1.
Through a ragged barn’s
single-window eye,
miles of narrow hallway
strangled in weed and vine.
Here you could pursue
a whisper for centuries
backward or forward—
either leads directly
to the cold lips of God.
2.
The adjacent field:
two barns teeter and tilt
away from one another
like jealous siblings
trapped too long inside
the same car or family.
If the first ever decides
to shove the second over,
this is but one more way
we might make measure
of the swirling moods of God.
3.
The heron leaps off the page
of the Chinese poem
and glides into my own,
a broken snake corpse
dangling from his bill.
What else can this be
but another love ballad
about the clandestine
arrangements of God?
From Drinking Guinness With the Dead: Poems 2007-2021 (Spartan Press 2022). Copyright © 2022 Justin Hamm. Reprinted with the permission of the author.