Consolation Miracle
In the pewless church of San Juan Chula, a Neocatholic Tzozil Indian wrings a chicken’s neck. Through piñoned air, stars from tourist flashbulbs flame, reflecting in the reddened eyes, in the mirrors statuary cling to, inside their plate- glass boxes. A mother fills a shot- glass with fire. Others offer up moon- shine swelling in goat bladders, the slender throats of coke bottles, as if gods too thirsted for the real thing. The slightest angle of a satellite dish sends me to Florida, where the sleepless claim the stars talk too much. They stumble to their own worn Virgin Mary whose eyes, they swear, bleed. Florida: rising with its dead, even as it sinks into the glade. Meanwhile, a coast away, the heavenly gait of Bigfoot in the famous Super-8, voiced over with a cyrptozoologist who’s all but laughed at the zipper-lined torso. Bigfoot trails out of California into my living room, a miracle in the muddled middle ground of the event horizon, in the swell between each seismic wave where time carries itself like Bigfoot: heavy, awkward, a touch too real to be real. And the miracle cleaners make everything disappear into faintly floral scents. Miracle-starved, out of sleep or the lack of it. I keep watching, not to see Bigfoot but to be Bigfoot, trapse through grainy screens, and the countless watching eyes, the brilliant nebulae bleeding. Yeti, pray you come again, you Sasquatch. Video our world for your religions. Memorize all these pleasure bulbs, these satellites, our eyes, our stars. Look: how we turn each other on tonight, one at a time.
Poem from Consolation Miracle, reprinted with permission of Southern Illinois University Press