Since dawn      Jesus has walked the streets

with different faces and portable PA’s    

expounding on hell      Jesus has nothing good to say

before the flowers come      roll down the road on wheels

on floats made of roses and rice and lentils      everything organic

 

Police on motorcycles clear the road     

an elegant performance of authority      weaving

through one other      practiced turns      braids

of uniformed noise that leave people breathless behind barriers

the hot dog vendors follow      8:00 AM smells like lunch

 

Out of the silent sky roars

a black triangle that eclipses the sun

jagged kite      stealth bomber dark overhead

before we knew it was part of the show

the beginning of tomorrow’s game

 

We squeeze tight in our nest

all our upturned and open mouths waiting

like wet chicks for our mother to drop

all the weight she holds           

down our throats

Fly west into sunset     soar across map lines and hours

touch down in adolescent groves    hand planted over forty years

by a married couple     tree by tree      growing their home

on old plantation land once deforested for pineapples     purchased

with borrowed cash but repaid in greenery   living

in island shade as if boundaries and clocks

remained uninvented     or counted only where anger is measurement

abacus in a suit      not the light or rain required

to conjure thousands of native palms    

reaching to sky and clouds over native soil

 

Fly home      forward into turbulence and migraines    

into bosses and modular office space

feel the blood in your brain drip

into contracts and clauses

talent on lockdown in the cells of spreadsheets

no formulas for trees       no sum of palms sprout

at the bottom of a white column      you

stand beneath wall clocks whose second hands sweep

and chop      until your body’s trunk is clear cut     

fallen man      nothing to stand for

Straight-line wasps and symmetry, half a brain on feed

and half a brain on build, the ingrained will to wait

out the garden hose’s harsh nozzle, a nest’s erasure,

because here is the home, the cedar shake not far

from fallen birches, unstained lawn chairs, and the seasonal

return to the right angles and joist of the hive.

Why kill them each summer? The children ride bikes nearby,

the mother walks for the mail. Last year wasps wiggled

the window between storm glass and pane and performed

for the kids like a science experiment—watch them

come and go, see the fresh eggs yearn and pulse.

We are here. They are here. We call for the chrysanthemums

ground into powder. For clarity

in toxins. Don’t save the receipts. It was

paid for years ago. Prophecy. We drowned chipmunks

in paint buckets as they paddled until tired

of swimming in seeds, while the mice nibbled on green

cubes in the cool basement, an engineered demise

they deliver to their own nests inscribed

with the symmetry of feed and build. The cost

is a bother. Our spending a cross out

through a line. The woodpecker returns. Bangs the house

for bugs. You can hear hunger knock in every room.

Feed and build, so we’re planting a religion of trees,

apple and magnolia, invitations for mouths and wings

and even the deer who stand on hind legs

to batter the high fruit from the sky to the earth

while you’re still trying to figure out why, why

am I in this day with these dulled senses.

Why live the world by laws of languages

unreadable, unrecognizable, meaning

tucked away in old, fossilized nests and mud dens

and hollowed trees uninhabited by the life

that presents today as nuisance—and it is said

Abraham or Christ would return unrecognizable

among us, maybe in the stench of homelessness,

the grip of addiction, or a woman who wants to live

as a man, but the symmetry is our undoing, always

feed and build, because the return is already

over and done, it lived as the tic or the ant,

silverfish or centipede, the savior in an insect

with a soft shell for this world.