Читать книгу Night Became Years - Jason Stefanik - Страница 8

Palliards, c. the seaventh rank of the Canting Crew, whose Fathers were Born Beggars, and who themselves follow the same Trade, with Sham Sores, making a hideous Noise, Pretending grievous Pain, do exhort Charity.

Hunting Grounds

From out of a frost-mottled scarf, I hear Michif

when not in the Sally Ann. For warmth I flex

my tendons under thrift-store layers, and loiter

as long as I can in any gas station washroom.

I make jobs, collect cans. I keep my boots slogging

a salty grocery cart. For one heel of day-old bread

I barter to thaw in a ATM. I rebirth

two rag-and-bone men from a snowbank, surveying

the virtue of their hand-me-downs: fusty folds

of grunge cardigans, oversized sweats, and clashing plaids.

Their same self-medicated mumblecore I recognize.

We form a party to attack the corroded bicycle padlocked

to a church fence. We’re undeterred by the slow pass

of police. We batten and bilk with snickery gibberish

at the Gospel Union Outreach Wagon, and absorb

flashlight probing for coffee and beef broth

from med-school undergrads. Off the overpass,

we bivouac in the rivets of an industrial park,

where we can pull off our balaclavas and squat

beside the grates blowing hot factory air, to share

our fresh cuts of dog tail roasted over paint can.

Scanterbury Church

Wind will compound to blanch fields as bone;

twilight bleeds now like hamstrung venison.

A lakeside sharpens into jagged stone

that can cut a hoof, but nothing crosses here

where kin dissolves into chalk-dry overtone.

Who is a symmetry without bearing –

we’ve backed the liars, everything will perish.

Before and after this world, we’re alone,

while all fails from birth canal to casket.

Sun and snow will crystal-film as one.

On steeple and headstone, frost catches shine.

Who knows when the last parishioner came

to slouch at a pew in doleful antiphon,

to hear the wind beat through the rickety gate

like a skull shrieking blasphemies, and sense