Paul Hoover

The workman made it; therefore it is not God —Hosea Hear the word of the Lord, ye children of Pittsburgh, of Calistoga and Tlaquepaque, ye hierophants and wishbones, teraphim and household plants, for I am a jealous God betrayed. My lover, whom I uplifted, has fallen to other affections. Weep for her outcast state, for I rescind her corn and her fields, her appetites and her husbands, her loom and the cloth of her weaving; yea, as she sleeps in her bed, I will crumble her idols of clay. I will cause to burn in the night her barns filled with swallows, her caves of rodents and bats, her racks of sidereal dresses, her stacks of serpentine hats. The velvet of her touch, once royal, I will scarify with my wrath. for I am a god betrayed; my love has reached into my weakness and turned my heart like a fist. Therefore, I will strip her naked and drive her into the field. In her body of filth and feathers, her blood of beasts and men, she is my desolation and a forgotten name. For my cosmos is contracted. My first world slips from my hands. Tell the people, my prophet Hosea, that I loved her more than love, and she gave not love in return. My anger flattens and spreads along the walls and windows. It glances from my mirrors and breaks the east wind’s bones. I was a God of such strength they could not guess my name. And this woman of human warmth suckled me like a child. Now I dwell with the mole, blindly, and my voice is thin as a gnat’s. I grieve what grinds in me, heavily. I am but a half note, half sung.

Art thou not from everlasting, O Lord my God, my Holy One? We shall not die. The rock lives in the desert, solid, taking its time. The wave lives for an instant, stable in momentum at the edge of the sea, before it folds away. Everything that is, lives and has size. The mole sleeps in a hole of its making, and the hole also lives; absence is not nothing. It didn’t desire to be, but now it breathes and makes a place, for the comfort of the mole. I am a space taken, and my absence will be shapely and of a certain age, in the everlasting. In the fierce evening, on the mild day, How long shall I be shaken? (Habakkuk)

And the fourth river is the Euphrates The first day was a long day and the first night nearly eternal. No thing existed, and only One was present to perceive what wasn’t there. No meaning as we know it; difference was bound in the All. On the first day, water, on the second day, land, on the third day, two kinds of light, one of them night. On the fourth day, laughter, and darkness saw it was good. But when God laughed, a crack ran through creation. On the fourth night, sorrow, staring away from heaven, torn in its ownness. No evidence then of nothing, but worlds upon worlds, underwritten, overflowing: the worlds of fear and of longing, lacking in belief, and the pitiful world of love, forever granting its own wishes. Out of dust, like golems, God created man and woman, and cast them into chance. And man was subdued in those days. All that could leap, leapt; all that could weep, wept. First of all places, Eden; last of all places, Cleveland; and a river flowed out of Eden, inspiring in the dry land a panic of growth and harvest season. The newly formed creation took from flesh its beast and from each word its sentence. And early loves and hatreds blew from thistle to thorn. Each thing that God created, he placed before man so that he may name it: cloudbank, hawk’s eye, lambkin,

I, the Lord, will make barren your fields and your fairways. Your refrigerators will be empty, no steaks and no leg bones, no butter and no cornbread. And I will remove your screen doors, force the mosquitoes indoors where you lie on the bed undead. For my house you have not readied, no flat screen and no broadband. My habitation is a wasteland of furniture from motel rooms. I will send the ostrich and badger in herds through your wrecked rooms; your beds will be entered by turnstile; the floor will seethe with bees. For my house is but a prefab; its roof lets in my rain. Woe is the Lord of Heaven who has no mansion on earth. Cries are heard from my fish traps, crows flap on my hat rack, pandemonium at the threshold as the owls and bats flit in. Silence reigns in the last place and the first place has no sway. For my knife-edge is impatient, my ledge crumbles like cake. I have warned you to beware. You await a handsome savior, but the plain man draws near... (Zephaniah)

My river is mine own, and I have made it for myself —Ezekiel And into the heavens, as on a bright day after rain, there came the shapes of four creatures, and they each had the likeness of a man, and each man had four wings outstretched and each wing had four eyes emblazoned, wide open, given to weeping at the worlds they contained: an eye-world of light, of fire and air, of water and its mirror, heart and its first fear; and in each world were four names, entangled in its forest of letters, whereupon I could read: Dow Jones, Cargill, Chevron, and DeKalb of the frozen seed, bearing but once and giving up its need; and under each name were discovered four meanings, literal, figurative, rational, dim, and under each meaning a counter-meaning, with its likeness of Freud, Marx, Hegel, and Lacan; and the four figures passed as one overhead, their wingtips linked like molten silver joined. For I, Ezekiel, had been given to eat the very substance of God, and my eyes were open and my mouth spake, as spring opens winter and winter closes fall; and the earth turned rightly, to my senses sweet. Son of man, they called me, a proverb and a sign. Say: I am a sign of the city, the cauldron where men burn down to desire. Say: I am the proverb of nothing and one, boiling over the fire, rising out of belief and falling, like a tyrant, out of derision alone. And lo, a likeness, as of the appearance of fire, the error of presence, of nothing as one, and lo, another likeness, the appearance of water, the error of absence, of something as none; for water surrounds all shapes that enter but has no shape of its own, and fire is the shape of ruin alone. For the princes of the sea shall cast their garments upon the land’s end: their scholar’s robes, sharkskin suits, and alligator shoes, their Nikes, Reeboks, and Chuvashian mittens knitted by the children of shepherds, by tinsmiths and ladies’ men, in the dark at the back of the store; for the princes of fire consume what they love, with the reckless ambition of gods. Yea, as I spake to dry bones that lay upon the earth, they danced into being, and chattered, one and one, down the hallways of my desert, the thresholds of my river. For the Lord builds ruined palaces and plants desolation, he receives what is absent; possesses all that is gone.

If it hadn’t rained, we would’ve gone to the beach. — Phuc Tran If we were in infinity, we would be everywhere, even inside ourselves, as taste resides in the walnut, and the walnut resides in the shell. Then we would thrive inside the subjunctive, where nothing happens but dreams of being, as paradise dreams of its inferno, the inferno of cotton candy. If only the world had ripened, like a pear, it might have melted the mirror in me, delivering its softness to the hard road of the mind, sixty miles from town. And if our grammar were even to our heat, comma, conditional phrase, comma, we’d be addicted to the sentence, sentenced to an exile that sees, hears, and thinks, and is often mistaken for love. Trees are chronologies; every leaf shines, and in turning over it winks an eye: if,if, and then. The world is possible meaning; the world is possible, meaning: I might have been an elf, had I been elfin. But I am not an elf. I am a giant with tiny hands: would,could, and should. Had I been winged, I might have flown from industrial field to pastoral alley on great woolen wings, with the blue face of a bee. Then it would have been said, “He is repairing to his persona,” or “He is retiring to his future.” I’ll copy this by way of the stars, reflective. Get back to me by facsimile or dream of climbing a night ladder to the place of ideal size, near a town of simple affection. If we had been born, lived our lives, and died, we might have existed. On the side of darkness, infinity; on the other, a sixty watt bulb.