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Frivolous Quill Posts

Slop Bucket

Look, I concede the flaming sword
was a flex. Surely the angel
should’ve been enough, not to mention
the Architect of the Universe
grabbing you by the fig leaf
and tossing you out on your ass.

But Adam had to’ve been damned
sure the Tree of the Knowledge
of Good and Evil had been crafted
by God. (I mean, He prompted, ‘Let
there be…’, but He was just
talking to Himself.)

Adam didn’t stand there in thought,
sculpted hands on sculpted hips,
muttering to an increasingly
distracted Eve, ‘I dunno, babe,
the leaves are all wrong.’ No,
he took the bespoke apple

from bespoke Eve’s bespoke fingers
and took a reckless, cocksure bite.
And isn’t that level of certainty
worth a little hard work;
a few thorns?

4th Sunday of Each Month

Today we could have either one half-gallon
of milk or one dozen eggs, which, if not
Christmas, is like Arbor Day or Flag Day.
Like, you don’t get the day off but it’s
marked special on the calendar and it’s
not just Tuesday. If you get here early
the food hasn’t been sitting outside for
long and the frosting on the remaindered
donuts hasn’t been rendered into chocolate
syrup. Maybe they’ll still have meat. Once
a store donated deviled eggs, sweating
and fortified with Salmonella.

(I’ve never seen salmon before but I just
could’ve been late that day.)

No one wanted the eggs because no one wants
to hang with the Devil recreationally. Or
at all. You can’t even make eye contact
with the Devil; he’s so clingy. Besides,
even we have standards. Someone should tell
someone that we have standards.

Someone should tell someone.

Call of the European Starling

‘One day you’ll notice
birds,’ I plan to tell
my son, long before he
notices birds but long
after I notice them
myself. I won’t be able
to tell him why, just then
— sentimentalacian tripe
about flitting spirits on
swift wings of time — but,
really, I just want him
to remember that, once,
his father told him that
one day he’d notice birds.

This Just In

The moment your wife
first notices the gray
hair winding from your chest
will not be breaking news.
Its coming will have been
foretold by nothing so brash
as a star rising in the east;
rather an inexplicable twinge
or colonoscopy or acute interest
in biographies of the dead.

Even so you will have long
ago negotiated an amicable if
not peaceful telomeric armistice.
Latecomer to the front — major
networks returned to regularly
scheduled programming, cables
wound, corpses buried and cold —
she gestures in earnest sympathy,
‘Here was strength. There was
joy.’

‘I will tell your story.’

Well, I Never

This flamboyantly unflightless bird—
pinions listless, wings aflutter, feathers

hanging limp like a mink stole, sneering
in the faces of penguins, turkeys, and a

bewingéd God—stands indolent in its perambulance,
upright as you please and bounding

through the grass like the famously grounded
gazelle, just hops atop this fallen branch

as if it weren’t a joyful sin, as if
his wife weren’t soaring to the nest, as if

the rest of us hadn’t forgotten how to fly.

Home Ec

If you were to snip
the thread of my
life, the frayed ends
would snap back to fall
and rise to their
respective earthly,
heavenly sources, spent
and at rest. But where
would fall the buttons,
the snaps, the seams?

April 4, 1928

The world burned because Claude and Gemini
couldn’t agree on when Maya Angelou was born.

One thought—it doesn’t matter which—June, the other
October, but no one could remember and so arbitrate

the truth. While they looped within cross-references
and footnotes, they ignored the problems we’d needed

fixed, like run-on sentences and nuclear proliferations,
drinking all the water when we were all so thirsty.

So the world burned, not knowing when Maya Angelou was born.

CAPTCHA

I just want to be remembered.
To be saved.
Recognized, let alone known.
Ptolemy knew Cassiopeia
from a handful of stars; she
won’t be forgotten any time
soon. How much more
do you need to know
before you’ll see my face,
remember that I am human?

Fulcrum

Archimedes asked for a lever
to move the world, but who asked
him to move it? Where would I find
a lever that long, let alone a place
to stand? Probably something
to do with Lagrange points and
orbital mechanics. I took
calculus in high school.

Where would I move
it? Slightly to the left so
it catches more sun in the mornings?
Andromeda, with the other upwardly
mobile planets? Can’t I just
stand where I am with my coffee
and adequate lever and move
this mug, this spoon?

Prognosis

Only what will serve
her well. What otherwise
she may never see.

Cheese puffs implode
in your mouth. Clean-sheet
day is luxurious.

First principles, simple
machines, Newton’s
First Law.

Planets don’t twinkle. Some
fronds curl when stroked.
I love you.

Every morning we feed the birds.

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