John Sibley Williams
Apiary & Woodshop
I can’t remember which saint burned
herself pure & which the Romans
burned the impurities from or if it matters,
sacrifice vs. sparrow,
natural or forced flight.
Where a bridge collapses,
shores remain. When the shores yield,
cliffs. If the cliffs,
we’ll still find something
high to fall from. Here
is a half-finished city shining
like the last untainted image of heaven:
crane rusted in place,
mid-air, useless, a painting
of an angel descending toward
a miracle that never comes.
Here the hinges of a house scream
from disuse. Do we even have
the right equipment to tune this
bedlam of bees into a honeyed song?
Will we always be three boards from
finishing this little boat?
As It Is on Earth
It’s like that sometimes. A man bends
so completely he begins believing in
his own holiness. An empty house
kids are too scared to vandalize sees itself
in time as haunted. Even the moon
our dogs wail to each night, as if in prayer,
fears a response is expected. The war
my brother brought home & the home he
pined for in war converge in an unruly
absence. Is it finally fair to say, like gods,
we make images to pour ourselves into?
Like rivers, how they tend to move
farther from the source? What skin
remembers & the mind reimagines:
between them a truth, serrated as light.