Poem Therapy at 11:40 P.M. October 22, 2010 - David Baker

Blue Dream - Tigran Akopyan

Tigran Akopyan is an Armenian painter who lives and works in the beautiful old city Prague,Czech. He exhibits his work regularly in Prague and other European countries. You can check out his work at http://www.tigranakopyan.blogspot.com.


The City of God
David Baker

Now we knelt beside
the ruined waters
as our first blood,
our bulb-before-bloom,
unfurled too early

in slender petals.
Now we were empty.
Now we walked for months
on softer shoes and
spoke, not quite with grief.

This morning four deer
come up to the yard
to stand, to be stunned,
at the woods' edge
on their hoof-tips. Their

ears twist like tuners,
but they stay for minutes,
minutes more, while
we are shadows behind
windows watching them

nip at the pine bark,
nibble some brown tips
of hydrangea. It's
been a mean, dry winter.
The last time I prayed—

prayed with any thought
of reply, any
hope of audience—
I sat in a church
and the city smell

of lilac, fumes from
the bus line, filled me.
The joys of the body
are not the sins
of the soul.

Who knows
how many have come
to be with us? We
knelt, not as in prayer,
beside the toilet

and watched the first one
leave us utterly—.
They were deer. Now they
are fog.
Now the wind

pulls back though the trees.
We know it will
be this way always
—whatever fades—
and the dreadful wake.

As I read this, I was filled with regret, for the ones that came and were rebuffed. Who knows how many came to be with us, but were turned back, for reasons that seemed so reasonable at the time. I think living is better understood in reverse, when the consequences for actions are crashing down and the choice, the solution is so obvious and solid. But solids quickly turn to liquid and become gas and disappear.