The bakery’s graffiti either spells HOPE
or NOPE. But hope and results
are different, said Fanny Brawne to her Keats
voiding his unreasonable lung.
Getting off the medicine
completely means light again
blinking to light. Device returned
to its factory settings. The complete black
of before the meteor shower
above the bakery. If you lose the smell
of leather, lemon, or rose,
studies show you will fail at being,
like Keats. I keep watching the same meteor
shower videos on YouTube
where awe is always a question of scale.
Night can be moths or weather, pulled in the dark.
The bakery, now, is beginning to close.
My arrhythmic heart
aches for the kind of dramatic arc
one can’t shop for. Or else to lease
what’s real for a while—
is this the good kind of consumption?
I wonder over the weight
of meaning. The difference between
hull and seed. The sugary
donut and its graceful hole. The greasy
bags that everyone leaves
in the alley leading to my door.
These scraps I work at like a crow.
Copyright © 2015 by Christopher Salerno. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 2, 2015, by the Academy of American Poets.
God sends his tasks and one does them or not, but the sky delivers its gifts at the appointed times: With spit and sigh, with that improbable burst of flame, the balloon comes over the cornfield, bringing another country with it, bringing from a long way off those colors that are at first the low sound of a horn, but soon are many horns, and clocks, and bells, and clappers and your heart rising to the silence in all of them, a silence so complete that the heads of the corn bow back before it and the dog flees in terror down the road and you alone are left gazing up at three solemn visitors swinging in a golden cage beneath that unbelievable chorus of red and white, swinging so close you cannot move or speak, so close the road grows wet with light, as when the sun flares, after an evening storm and you become weightless, falling back in the air before the giant oak that with a fiery burst the balloon just clears.
From To the Place of Trumpets, published by Yale University Press, 1988. Copyright © 1988 by Brigit Pegeen Kelly. Reproduced by permission of Yale University Press.