“And he said unto me, Son of man, hast thou seen this? Then he brought me, and caused me to return to the brink…”
—from Ezekiel 47: 6-10
INVOCATION
lento, ma non grave
Hush.
Down in the coal mine
the canaries are sleeping.
Give them rest.
Peace, peace.
Breathe deep.
Calm the troubled waters
of the heart. Eat, drink.
For tomorrow we shall
be as the gods.
Keep us warm, winter,
til Shiloh come.
MENE MENE TEKEL UPHARSIN
adagio, accelerando
Ah, but Aprils come,
restoring memory.
Truth still springs out
of this desecrated temple of an earth. O prophetess!
O Huldah! Read all the words of the book: the weighing
and the wanting. Number the days.
Oh Lord,
we have sinned, we have sinned,
and it shocks us deer-still
until we bolt, fight or flight.
Forgive this animal panic, for we are
a shameless nation. Our skin
has never known sackcloth.
No one taught our hands to rend.
In the distance, ashes ascended
(dein goldenes Haar Margarethe
dein aschenes Haar Sulamith)
and we counted ourselves righteous
among the nations, hasidei
for coming late, from behind
locked doors. In the fires,
we found another faith. Baptized
the world in two: armies of Ahura Mazda
fighting Angra Mainyu’s hordes.
Shining stars against swastikas
and sickles. Selah. With what measure
we mete. Now are we the baddies?
is an existential question.
So hide your face. A wicked generation
makes a sign: Juden ist der Eintritt
verboten. We hang it in the meetinghouse
in St. Georg. We send it to the St. Louis.
The ship turns away. But we are guiltless,
for we won the war. Selah. Guilt is for losers.
Heroes have to be brazen-faced, stiff-necked,
or else our whole world falls apart.
See our Eden-leafed innocence, here
in the goodly corner of the vineyard
cumbered with whip-drawn blood
and filled with strange fruit.
Shut our eyes tight as borders.
Make our ears millstone-heavy.
Lest we see and hear and mourn
and melt into nothingness.
O Lord
Our skin, our skin
our delicate skin.
O Limhi
what winds
have these soiled hands sown?
NOSTALGIA
Presto. Chango.
Oh for the days when Amon was king!
Bright age of blurred recollection,
when history was an old warrior
sputtering off to its timely end.
We drove then on Sundays,
going nowhere. And the fuel was cheap
and the roads stretched on and on
and the Church was rising
out of obscurity, swelling like
the stock market—not bickering
in the wilderness like Israel’s
children.
And Goliath was dead
(killed in Rocky IV).
And David was young, so
young and so handsome. And
Murphy Brown had shattered
ceilings, showering us with
glass like confetti. Like a
sparkling rain.
One afternoon on the playground,
the sun rose red. And it wasn’t
the apocalypse. Might’ve just been
the air. The steel plant was still
running. Had been since the war,
burning coke ovens to pump out paychecks.
(When they closed it down, they sold the
parts to China. Gear boxes and shears,
cooling beds and bundlers.) That mill
meant more to people than momentum can
explain: you’d have thought Ozymandias
punched a clock there. Look on my Works,
ye Mighty, and despair!
Oh for the days when Amon was king!
O God above, exquisite hour made so brief.
We plugged the computer into the phone line.
Remember? The strange soundscape of connection?
Like a robot trilling pleasure while exploring, then
sounding an alarm, then lost beneath the static of a
ravenous sea.
THE FREE WAY
A piacere
The billboard sprouts above the freeway like
a stunted tree. Reds and oranges garishing
a dirt bike rider’s helmet. His head juts out
insistent. NOBODY LIKES TO BE A PASSENGER.
Autumnal god, what sacrifice shall we
give thee? The cycle drives hard forward:
reckless, breathless, in commodified thrill.
NOBODY LIKES TO BE A PASSENGER.
NOBODY LIKES TO BE.
Sweet prince. It is scripted that we struggle.
To sleep is to fold and the ante is breath. Bet on.
Step on the gas, man. Step on the gas. Acceleration
feels like liberty. It’s a free country.
Let me tell you: no one tells you
what to do. You hear that? No one
tells you what to do. Play it again
on a feedback loop. No one tells you
tells you tells you what to do.
And I’m proud to be an American
where at least I know I’m free
and I don’t care who has to die
to give that right to me
and it’s all stand up, anyway.
The things that people say. The way
they grandstand. Demand so much
of you. You’ve gotta just choose
what channel you’re gonna listen to.
Like the good book says:
you’ve got to choose. Today.
The billboard sprouts above the freeway like
a stunted tree. Reds and oranges garishing
a dirt bike rider’s helmet. His head juts out
insistent. NOBODY LIKES TO BE A PASSENGER.
Nobody likes to be. Nobody likes the paralysis
that comes with weighing consequences. We prefer
bland choice to agency. Give us a menu in Egypt
and we’re free. You gotta fight for your right
to party.
You hear that, old man? du alter kaker?
Nobody likes to wander in the wilderness,
chasing a cloud, living off heaven’s handouts.
Give us meat. Give us flesh, that we may eat.
Give us bodies to tear through.
And the word of the Lord came to Ezekiel:
oh shepherds of Israel, I will feed you.
Summon an east wind to blow from the sea,
and I will feed you with freedom. Like quail.
Not one day or two or five or ten or twenty:
think logarithmically
stink logarithmically
and shall it
suffice suffice suffice
suffice suffice
when the rot creeps through your nostrils
cakes your mouth
seizes your throat
blooms out through the lungs
and now your sat levels are dropping
a doctor is using his calmest voice
to introduce the tube you might need
just to breathe. Is this still nothing?
Don’t you people ever get enough?
Don’t you ever ever get enough?
It’s enough to make a God weep.
BAGADNU
lamentoso
At about the age of twelve years
my mind become seriously imprest
with regard to the sittuation
of the world of mankind. We’d been
driving the U-Haul for days. Arrived
in Ohio about 3 a.m. We stopped at the
Cross-Country Inn (what nominative
determinism). And it was night and it was
morning and I went out to find our parking space
empty. I stood there, just holding the key—
reaching for nothing. My father came to look
for me: The truck’s been stolen, he said. And my
cognitive dissonance collapsed (some words kill
Schrödinger’s cat).
The ward took us in
The clothes on my skin came from a big black bag
they handed us Sunday. Someday I’ll express what that
time meant, though the logic escapes me. Like in a dream,
the details tell the story. For a month, somehow, we had no
house? So we slept at Sister Beucler’s, downstairs, seven of us
in one big room. I remember her kitchen table. She and Dick
rolling the dice, playing Kismet. It was meant to be. A flush,
a full house. A family beyond family. I fell for the first girl
I saw, in our future bishop’s backyard. In this great churn
of a migrant world, I had a home.
Thus from the age of twelve years to fifteen
I pondered many things in my heart. Pulling a
handcart in our suburb’s Fourth of July parade:
how one of the primary kids crawled in and fell
asleep. Or that time, traveling in a caravan of
cars to our temple in Washington D.C. when I took
the last seat in the van with three Beehives and the
Young Women presidency. We played their camp games.
The leaders told stories of pregnancy and of being
delivered. That drive, they tied me to their faith
umbilical. It was a Zion to me.
Mormonism is the radical redistribution
of social capital. Selah. Mormonism is a
loom to weave beloved community.
Now the fates take their scissors
to the tapestry.
At least in my land, so divided already.
Like the waters of the Red Sea before
they rushed in to swallow the Egyptians.
Shears not of our making
still slice, still sting
and we bleed
trust.
O Lord my God is there no help
for the widow’s son?
What more could we have done
for this vineyard? The roots
are good, but the branches blow
unsteady. I guess we grew too
lofty. How’s the air up there?
And the children of Israel
departed thence at that time,
every man to his tribe and to his family,
and they went out from thence
every man to his inheritance.
All the funerals. All the funerals
we watched on Zoom. While we prayed:
save us. Grant us, O God, a miracle.
And the prophet said that one had come,
verily—but no prophet is honored in his
own country.
In those days there was no king in Israel:
every man did that which was right in his own eyes.
Let me tell you a story:
Once, healers poisoned me. Right down to the marrow.
And I trusted. I lived. But raw fears still shoot
through me. Flaming arrows strike synapses tindered
in agony. O brothers and sisters, believe me:
I am not past feeling in a plague.
It’s such a stupid tragedy. We could have faced
things together. Once we were good at facing things
together. So why turn and tear? The pearl, the pearl.
Was the pearl trust?
A friend sat home Sabbaths, watching ward members on
Facebook, wondering: is it safe to share air now? Safe
to breathe beside the people seized by these personas?
On the week my family first went back, our bishop recited
the rules we should be keeping. That day so many peeled masks
off between the sacrament and elders quorum meeting.
I am sensitive, yes, but that vision was hard on me. The
same men who wield rules like a blacksmith’s hammer shed
counsel so casually. I used to think: if we are not
always compassionate, we run, at least, obedient.
But now I see. Hearts are ruled most by conventionality.
Selah. C’est la vie.
I must confess, sometimes a nevi’s madness comes to me.
I’ve entertained this fantasy of walking into the chapel,
sitting on a pew, and (theatrical as the Old Testament) lighting
a cigarette. Letting the smoke ascend like an offering, like
a call for help or condemnation. As if to say to the people:
arise, and awake from your slumber. See something. Say something.
Do something. Don’t desecrate this space, in the shadow of death,
with a shameless face.
But metaphors break down. My image would betray me. We’re talking
about a pandemic. Ceci n’est pas une pipe:
a pipe kills slowly.
Ah Zion, o daughters of Zion, all we like sheep.
So many holes in the armor of God when an evil day came.
During services now, I sit in the foyer and I fret.
After the trays come around, we move to the stage.
The curtain stands before me like a tabernacle veil
closed. I can’t find the exaltation in this same
sociality. I was baptized in the Jordan: now it’s
borne me to the Dead Sea.
BROKEN CISTERNS
con moto
Drink the lakes dry
and lick the dust.
Drink the lakes dry
and lick the dust.
Ozymandias built a dam
in the south country.
Turned canyons to a
carrying pot. What kind
of man commands the waters?
Only an idol or a god.
The floods rose up
to the rainbow’s feet—
and then great was the fall
thereof.
Drink the lake dry.
Old Ozzy sketched out another plan
(he was getting kinda senile, see)
so he promised to dredge out Utah Lake
and paint in pavement.
A parable or
parody awaits some future poet there.
Look on my Wreck, colossal and bare.
Lick the dust.
In a thirsty land,
it seemed a waste
to let fresh water
reach the Great Salt Lake
and dreg to sediment.
So we wrung out the streams
and starved our sea. O God
have mercy on efficient sinners,
who keep golf courses green
and sow cash crops
until arsenic kisses air,
and we reap the whirlwind
poison.
In the coal mine,
the canaries are coughing.
Strangle them. Peace, peace.
Breathe deep.
Eat. Drink
the lakes dry and
lick the dust.
Then said I: Lord, how long?
And he answered:
Until the cities be wasted
and the houses without man
and even the land be
utterly
Desolate.
And my Laman-heart could not believe
but in Lehi-dreams I saw. God called
Behemoth in judgment against us, to
slurp up the rivers and strip the land.
His bones were bars of insatiable iron.
I felt myself dissected in his algorithmic eyes.
Ah, how the crowds competed to be swallowed
by that great and spacious beast! Our wills
fodder and feast. We ants before an archon.
And there was none to protect,
for we had dragged Queen Sabbath
from her throne. Splintered the spear
(its shaft of Sabbath-years, its head
of Jubilee) once used to keep the beast
at bay. We have forgotten how to rest
and we are prey.
Then God called
Leviathan from the deep, with surging waters
and fervent heat (unseen since the Jurassic)
He is drawn toward burnt offerings of creatures
long dead. With his tail, he smashes cities.
Stirs up hurricanes, tsunamis. Sapphire mountains melt
before his breath—and his jaws are stretched
out still.
We sprint for them.
Head-first, heedless. In an ecstasy
of excess.
Step on the gas, man.
Kill the canaries.
Burn this scroll, Jehoiakim.
Burn even the spaces between
the lines.
THE FULLNESS OF THE GENTILES
maestoso
Even the sun will burn
to ash, some day when days
have lost their meaning. Already
beneath the bare feet, continents
circle, cycle to collide. Mountains rise
like grain, for river-gleaning and to be
swallowed by the sea. Time winds and wears:
its fingertips pitter patterns on the back
(conquerors are conquered; cicadas hatch)—
that textured touch insistent, dark and
light. Let the night unfold, the body
slow. Ola tras ola hasta cubrirlo todo.
O Son of Man, why weep
for Lazarus?
Why shed tears for Jerusalem
when the sun sets? Not one stone
can stand. In the kaaba’s corner,
pilgrims’ hands smooth over cracks:
even the black stone breaks
in tectonic time. The foundations
of pioneer temples shift—speech
goes all Babel—before the weather
gets weird and the monsters come.
Nahui Ōcēlotl, Nahui Ehēcatl,
Nahui Quiyahuitl,
Nahui Atl.
Nahui Ōllin.
O Tenochtitlán. On the seal
where blood spilled, boots step.
And it dawned and it dusked
in a blink of God’s eye:
the Gentiles take their time.
Y el sangre camina más despacio
y los dientes se aflojan y los ojos
se nublan y los días y los años
sus horrores vacíos acumulan
O Son of Man, why sweat? The knife
lifts and the knife drops. Prayers
drift hypocritical until they fall
flat. Salt loses savor: what’s the matter
with that?
Sever the roots and nip each branch.
Pulp them into paper and push it. Around and
around. Keep your eye on the lady. Keep your
eye on the lady. You’re bound to win, eventually.
To the side, a sparrow falls. From the shore, a
siren calls.
Bodies are piling on the beaches,
dripping dashed hopes.
Cielo y silencio se contienen
en un suspiro.
Oh Son of Man: why.
The olive-trunks shudder,
the trees’ leaves cry.
Age after age tumbles, hurtling
down the hill, but for a moment
in the garden all is still. Akal.
There is no time.
y él mira la sangre caer de sus ojos
It breaks the mortal mind. Even a fraction of his
bleeding blinds. A sip from the cup and the lips
go numb. Let it change you Saul-seismic or run,
Jonah, run!
When the Son of Man comes,
what will he find on this earth? Love runs cold.
Faith flies south for the winter.
THE WASTE PLACES
con grazia
Jonah ran from the stink of sin
Jonah ran to Jaffa from the stink of sin
Sin was waiting at the door to let him in
Everywhere’s a little Ninevah
Oh, sinnerman, where you gonna run to?
And the stone was split
(what’s the matter with you, rock?)
the basin boiled dry
(don’t you see I need you, rock?)
and an empty riverbed lay
dusty and red beneath a silent sky.
So Jonah ran. Sinnerman.
But the whale always brings you back.
Sputter awake to blue light.
Hunched figures drift down the shifting
paths of a vast metropolis. Meta-Polis.
Eyes glaze numb with exhaustion: I did not
think this city had undone so many. Smiles
tumble by, landmarks churn. From red light
districts, packaged passions shine for every
stale taste. Oh, but here’s something new!
the town squares trill. A snicker, a snap,
a fresh outrage. The news cycle faster faster
and the breath quickens again. A quarrel, a riot:
there a brawl. A war, incivil war. Under the sun,
the heart’s blood pumps away steady. We pour it
into sandbagged channels. Wade. In filtered suburbs,
housewives whisper of conspiracies. (Can you believe…?
Have you seen…?) Hawkers shout sins from the rooftops:
we eat it up. More delicious than a muezzin’s call to prayer.
Swarming city.
Electric streets spark like
downed power lines. Grasping
labyrinth: caught in a current,
the muscles spasm
and clutch—
tenser tighter
tenser tighter
as the flesh burns.
Burning burning burning burning
Breathe.
Sh: ease open the muscles of the hands
Sh: ease open the muscle of the heart
Sh: ease open the eyes to illusion
Hush. A broken old fisherman
whispers from the dust of
peace beyond understanding:
Shantih shantih shantih
Peace, peace—where there is no peace.
Look: a sanyasi sits tranquil on the banks
of the shrinking salt sea. Cut: the ties
that bind to suffering. Cut: the snarled
cords that place a soul in time. All it takes
is a certain knowledge. A certain kind of
remove.
Oh, but I drank in Nanak’s nectar
from my mother’s womb. Child of the
kitchen, not the drawing room—
o poet o pandit o percival
I thirst for sangat still
and I will
fight. I will hold you, wrestler,
through the night. Swear me a blessing:
put your hand under my thigh. Grihasti
for eternity, I.
This husk is my home.
This broken-promise land.
Here I stand.
Here I shovel.
Dig the roots and
dung them, water them with tears.
Begin the work of years, though fruits
come bitter in the fall. Bless me,
wrestler, with longing. Bole so nihal!
Shall we set these lands in order?
Together: can we still reach for an order?
Bear the burden. Burning in the bones.
Hear the word of the Lord. Dem bones.
I look into my son’s eyes
and I see Akal. Call the beggars in.
In the temple’s court, the table’s turned:
climb in. Draw out the soul to the hungry
as an offering for sin. Repairer of the breach,
Restorer of paths to dwell in.
Build the waste places.
Then beneath the bare feet
feel the water trickle
toward the east, touch
the ankles
the knees
the loins
Son of Man,
hast thou seen this?
(I believe; help thou mine unbelief.)
Cry out:
Flow down (power, Lord)
Flow down (power, Lord)
Flow down (power, Lord)
Go down (power, Lord)
Kingdom (power, Lord)
Power (power, Lord)
Power
Oh Aaron Oh Levi
Oh king, king of righteousness
Oh Akal
* * * * *
Notes on the Poem
* * * * *
James Goldberg is the author of four volumes of poetry: Let Me Drown with Moses, Phoenix Song, Song of Names, and A Book of Lamentations. He is also a novelist, essayist, playwright, scholar, literary translator, and longtime advocate for Mormon literature. He is a co-founder of the Mormon Lit Lab and currently serves on the board of the Association for Mormon Letters and on the advisory board for the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts. Goldberg lives in American Fork, Utah with his wife, Nicole Wilkes Goldberg, and their four children. By day, he writes for the Church History Department.
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