23
two poems by jeff mann
"where will you spend eternity?'
It is not the question to ask
a middle-aged man who never gets enough
adulation or rough sex, who’s never in
the sweet position of wreaking havoc
on those he hates. Not the question
to ask a man with an inconvenient excess
of passion, of imagination.
The pamphlet—
horsefly, sweat-bee—appears under
my windshield wiper at the first I-64 West rest stop
inside Kentucky, and for the next three hours
the Christian question flaps there, teasing
like a Bourbon Street stripper—coy and distant
flashes of what can be seen but never touched.
And so I drive, yearning and murmuring, into heaven
after heaven, past Winchester and Fort Boonesborough,
through Tim McGraw’s Greatest Hits, Volume II,
while alternative eternities unfurl like morning
glories, azure satin inside my skull.
Here’s the Paradise of Domesticity,
isolate farmhouse
without neighbors, in the thick of white pine and red oak.
Let John and I sip Scotch and lounge by the fire,
bread rise, beef stew simmer, pear leaves
fill November’s windows, bearing the ruddy
textures of mountain dawn. Let there be curled serenities
of cats, the savor of fruits pies without calories,
and an endlessness of unread books.
Here’s the Paradise of Justice,
where certain politicians, preachers,
coal-company executives, are mine to disembowel
every blessed morning with this dull hunting knife.
Feed them bread crumbs mixed with coal dust, stained with wine,
and sweet rain water collecting in slurry ponds. (Cont.)