Three Poems
Fire Flowers
"Fire Flowers" first appeared in Rattle
In Japanese, the word for "office" is a character composing
two smaller characters meaning "enclosed space"
and "slumping corpse".
Outside, a soft rain’s falling on what was once the corner deli
but is now an immense pile
of pipes and bricks, chips of cement, and crumpled menus.
I used to eat there with my wife, who’s no longer my wife but rather
someone’s girlfriend. We used to order a plate of cheese fries
and discuss the feasibility of being married,
not knowing we could have more efficiently spent that time
doing something else, like organizing an expedition to the Arctic
or handing out flyers to save the corner deli
from its eventual demolishment.
If I turn on the TV set, I’ll no doubt be reminded that today’s not Saturday
and tomorrow’s not Sunday, and whatever I decide to watch
will simply be a way not to think about what I’m not doing.
On these days between the days I’m actually living,
relatives occasionally call to assure themselves I’m still breathing,
telling me small details I could do without, while in their voices’ dark corners
I hear their latent, unfulfilled desires, and part of me
wishes to take their hands and guide them towards the unknown,
but just as I’m reaching out, grazing their invisible skin,
the connection’s cut, breaking them loose into their lonely longing.
On my coffee breaks, I muse on the metaphysical consequences
of a slumping corpse in an enclosed space,
and I think how our word for "fireworks" is practical, but in Japanese
it’s literally a "fire flower", which I find to be inherently more poetic:
"If you look into the sky at this very moment
you may see flowers composed of fire," and you may see stars
exhaling their last breaths onto a coal canvas,
momentarily warming the vast frozen space.
The Things We Become
"The Things We Become" first appeared in Merge
A suit laid out on the couch
awaiting tomorrow’s workday, a tenth-row mezzanine seat
at the ballgame. Someone
steals your wife as you finish reading
a detective story. Someone else
steals your house as you fall behind on the rent.
Your skin becomes your identity. Your manhood is
a separate entity. You feel yourself shrinking
into obscurity. Obscurity. The darkness of one, of one
in the morning in the country, stars glimmering
untouchable. Morbid celestial giants. Abandoned, you are lifted
into a long dream, eyes opened/not seeing,
not wanting to see. Wars erupt upon your doorstep
entrapped in newspaper print. Headlines scream
of casualties. Some call them
eventualities, unfortunate mistakes leading to
inevitabilities. Fire is suffocating your cerebral cortex,
senses fabricated by the thoughts of others. You’ve
relinquished your processes of reason.
A bomb explodes somewhere you’ve
never been. Stop worrying about the
consequences of these actions.
Come embrace divinity. Step into
the sacred breath of eternity.
Breathe in.
Imagine your life in perfect symmetry,
in perfect balance with the stars abandoned
in a black sky unable to forget you
because it will never even know you have existed.
Shadow Of The Divine
"Shadow Of The Divine" first appeared in Off The Coast
God is born in iridescent stains swirling through a puddle where piglets tread, their curlicue tails miniscule tornadoes twisting as the bristled sow floats by like an earthen angel, ‘til her breasts caress the swimming offspring dressed in gasoline’s lingering rainbows, an acrid scent of God unleashed from propane tanks, trails of oil delivered from deserts ten million steps away.
Children play in the shadow of factories, in streams saturated with runoff, their skins reddened, rough peeling like serpents’ sloughs; their lungs congested with undiagnosed toxins; God inhabits their chests, wheezes with laboured breaths, sparkles in their eyes as darkness descends over the Andes.
Workers spread cyanide over the open pits, extracting gold, earning the freedom to work and live in their own country. Schools of river trout float belly-up, grown rich with gold, gathered by girls in hand-woven baskets on a bed of orchids and lilies.
God watches over his creatures, christening the growth of fungi and fashioned plagues protecting his earth. Fragile, orphaned, neglected. Burnt fields, felled forests, emptied oceans and men devouring orders, families, and species, ‘til nothing remains but to name God in a swirl of oil.
When not writing poetry, Jonathan Greenhause makes a living as an interpreter, whispering into people’s ears so they’ll understand what’s going on around them. He is also an avid traveller, having ventured to the post office several times in the past few months.
In addition to his poems "Alice After Her Adventures In Wonderland" and "Colonizing Ants In The Desert", which appeared in Neon #14, his poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous publications throughout the United States and internationally, including Many Mountains Moving, Rattle, Slab, and Going Down Swinging (Australia).