Paradise
Paradise
Below our borrowed house the avocado groves
Fold their precious fruit beneath leaf sheen
Like children hiding toys in their coats.
On chain-link fence around the bursting groves
Are signs which warn that picking fruit is theft.
I think about this crime on evening walks
Through air made hazy soft by sun and sea.
Not that I’m tempted by the husky green
Globes hung like planets in a crystal sphere
Beneath the waxy shade of these exotic trees.
I’ve done no theft so blatant, but no doubt
I’ve taken, often more than I can give.
I’ve been more pond than stream, and who has not?
If we had known at first how not to steal,
In that first grove those long, hard years ago,
This house beside the sea, above trees swaying
Like some small congregation rapt in quiet prayer,
Could really be the place we dwell in all
Our life beneath the blessed summer sky,
Our endless, easy life beside the swishing sea.
Vigil
This rain before the feeble dawn
Says something that I can’t quite catch,
A muttering, a mumbling on,
Beneath its breath. The small drops etch
Canyons through frosted window panes
That frame the dark through which it rains.
Out there a tree I can’t quite see
Shakes its uncouth and dripping beard
In icy wind. I hear the tree
Unfurl a shuddering cry, a weird
Howling into the settled dark,
A groaning pulled from limb and bark.
I sit within my lighted room.
The dark has swallowed everything
Outside, and all that’s in that tomb
Cries out to make the darkness ring.
Be born again, it tries to say,
As cold earth shudders toward the day.
The Organ Concert
For Halloween, she always played us Bach.
The campus chapel rattled like a cough
Was lodged between its buttressed ribs or stuck
Beneath the bellowed lungs. The choir loft
Shuddered and hummed with throbbing bass like bone
Around a brain jarred by a sudden stop.
She wore a witch’s hat to set the tone
And played a console with a skull on top.
Yet every year, like veins beneath the skin,
A something more than kitsch began to show
Through as she played, and there were moments when
We caught enough pure scourging fire to know
This spinster organist—so meek, so tame—
Played from a heart singed by some holy flame.
Benjamin P. Myers
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