Each day flamed with terror as before Rumson double-taped keep-quiet warnings to her door Of hollow polished brass. Her strafing tongue Had killed three husbands by forty-one. 5 The Hell-faced knockers clanged with the cold Doom of white-knuckled death scything into town For restful autumn. She was marked By the thin hand of cancer, and she bore Its incongruous, leaking fingerprint 10 On face and bone. Armed with the Great Faith And real estate holdings out of state, She owned an antique bible that the Sorbonne's Near holy medieval French department Would rob or kill for; she wept, and ground 15 Her school marm heel at noon in time To the molten passages that she howled Out loud from Solomon. Her hysterical, Outbound faith and stilted Domestic majesty even made her answer 20 The skidding halloweeners dressed as indians In pilgrim English. "Take these and eat Them with the name of Jesus on your lips. Now pray, pray," she'd say, and lavish Johnny Appleseed apples to vanished faces. 25 The bridge to Belmar still gapes this span Of the chill Atlantic, wrestling to the shore, beside The closed clubhouse perched on painted stones The color of water, while the dumb, vortexing gun Of night releases stars over candy-littered lawns. And now 30 The wind is tearing through the oaks, and more Than oaks. She speaks, "God's breath's a kiln Of salvation." She hooks the door shut with her foot, The apple falling rotten from her hand.... Our runty graveyard is filling to the brim 35 With sticks and stones. Kneeling in the chalk Dust of her unfinished basement, she stoked Her gaudy bible to the furnace, page by page, Until the Spirit itself had raged and came Inspired to the twisting entrails of the flame. 40 The cold voice was clarifying and was clear. She heard its crystal mumble, and she swung The tiny grate on its small hinges wide, and saw God's face smiling. Only her head, crowned With the spent light sizzling as it went 45 Could fit itself inside. "It's hard, oh, so hard To just laugh and laugh enough to die."
From the collection "Red Bank"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.