Two Poems

American Still Life (Ode to Nirvana)

The presbyterian minister lounges
by a gas pump in a stroke of yellow
lamp light, hand on the nozzle,
finger on the trigger, kept like his
knuckles on the steering wheel
calloused from something like prayer. Highlights on, he drives
past wire-framed buildings, the corpses of giants
gasping for earth. Dirt roads soothe
him, backstreet confessional booths
with thatched banners announcing two graveyard plots, only 600 dollars.
He frequents a building where the neon open sign misses a letter,
rifles through patched fabrics in a thrift store bin,
finds jeans like Kurt Cobain’s. The basement has another banner,
this one reading Alcoholics Anonymous
with those steel stools arranged
in a circle like musical chairs.
When the seats fill up, he shakes everyone’s hand,
listens, hears, blesses with no judgement.
When the seats empty, he stays seated,
removes his collar and gown, stashes them and waits an hour
until the banner switches, one more sign: Narcotics Anonymous,
another support group, one vice or another,
and this time he does no blessing, only listens, hears, speaks
to no judgement and no response. Fill in the second
support group with any so-called sin
and this scene is still eucharistic. He leaves
after everyone leaves and becomes
a priest again, puts on his collar to cover the chest hair
peeking past his shirt. At the gas station again, he
fills it up to the quarter and the pump makes a click as gas drips
from the nozzle, saturating the asphalt sanguine in this light:
a narcissus sheen going only so far, dark blue
fields of rolling nothingness reflecting the dark red
of unlearning American exceptionalism,
matching his face in the one hour
between teacher and student, caretaker and caregiver,
between sermon, answer, and prayer,
leaving his condition cleft somewhere between
impossible and inevitable,
white and dark white.


***


Jade Rabbit Tattoo Regret

An old man asks for food, and a rabbit
throws itself onto the fire for others to eat its flesh
but the rabbit doesn’t burn. In return, the old man reveals
himself the jade emperor and brings the rabbit to the moon
where it pounds with mortar and pestle the elixir of life
in vain. I’ve looked to the moon
for the rabbit, not the medicine. Let me ask you
what you think the fire means. Does generosity require
self-sacrifice? I apologize if I sound bitter, but really,
I relate more to the fire, as others pass through me
in hope of a reward.
 
In my version, the rabbit
burns, its body devoured as a palimpsest of desires.
Because the thing I want least is a body, and the most is
to give it up for another. Read between the dermal lines
what the body means. I wanted a tattoo of the jade
rabbit, not of ink inserted in but of skin
pulled out: the world, the rabbit — a crevasse, and my body,
the fire. The civil, and the symbolized. Being the rabbit
means not waiting around for the aftermath. And after
the laser removal, what is left? The rabbit, the fire, the moon?
The herbs being crushed? The crushing?
The living despite it all.