Lisa Grove

All we know of history we learn from scenes in the mosaic of bone on the Senate floor: The Flood makes graves of the fields, and the angels harvest enough suffering to live for another thousand years. Moses pulls off his beard and lights a cigarette, I’m tired of pretending. He pushes his box of spare commandments under his bed, and as he drifts to sleep, his eyes, like caves, fill with paintings of woolly rhinos. Sailing ships forest a small island. One light shines from a caravel — captain’s quarters. It’s Christopher Columbus. All night he’s been sewing shrouds as arrival gifts for the natives. Little Chris presses his bleeding fingers to his mouth and cries quietly,No one appreciates me. God and the devil tuck him into bed. It’ll get better, they say. Together they complete the shrouds for him, while he dreams of golden nipples. As it was, it is now. Spring translates the earth into hope — tongues of grass taste the sea salt on the west wind and the blood on soldiers’ boots. This morning, one of the old poets — unkillable cockroach — cycled past me, yelling, You have the brightest light in America! Ha ha! On my dresser, a spider makes a web along the contours of my bra. We lie on the bed together; I run my hand up the muscles of your leg and feel its eons of evolution, now outlawed by the Senate.

In the energy crisis my city has turned to burning angel skins. I read by their light, a book of elegies. A fruit fly lands on Amichai, I slap him flat Against the page. Now it is an elegy for him, as well, And his tomb. And I am a terrible, toothless god, Stringing blades of grass between the tongues of sheep. Ash of angel fire drifts over my head, falls in my coffee. O Holy, Holy, Holy indigestion. I bribe the coming day with open windows And freshly washed underwear Hung out on the clothesline, Slipping hastily over the hips of winds. The winds know, all you have to do is Open your mouth, the flies will come.