God writes straight with crooked lines–Portuguese proverb
THE slow day burns across the rubble dial.
1 The shadows twist, slow as a hanging thing.
In faded skirts the faded children troop.
And women curse and bill collectors ring.
On curbs the men and dogs together rot.
Those are the men. They talk. The dogs do not.
Morning is sober in that rocky land.
Noon is a whistle on the heated brick.
Baseball is sparse among the glass and sand.
Twilight begins—the ruthless meters click.
Along the streets adultery and gin
Together watch the immortal stars begin.
The millipede his roundhouse in the rot
Forsakes and like a rubber choo-choo crawls;
The bedbug in a teeny jeep patrols
The shot terrain of urea-colored walls:
A ruby scarab, seal of quicker doom
Than Sulu drum or Pharaoh’s stark tomb.
This violent page by plane and robin read
Spells god in crooked letters, hard as slate;
Is (saving your presence, nuns, who over my head
Will bust the bottles of your holy hate)
A rough whodunit tale of bloodlit rage.
Horror and fascination turn the page.
Study the strange incognitos of god:
A milkweed set afire, a naked thief,
Penguin or pike, or rowdy avatar
Here in the husk and falling vaults of grief
Among the rotgut and the drunken drums,
The weird and fertile cubist of the slums.
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