John

Blank contract, ultimate diamond,
genus at the center of the house.
    The curtains
creak, the streetlights creak
    We think
we think, and live.


                      Joan

The work is done. Our work is done.
    To hear the news from you
    not news I hear but you. And rowed
to work on little waves.
And fray to touch, and touch again.


                    Jon

Brown starlings in a brown dawn.
    Hoof ends scattered on the field.
Good earth, amend.
    What wears men’s smell?
     Words do, not men.  


                    Iohan

Cold is order, we are so cold.
     A heat that streaks
    across and gone,
a meteor behind a cloud.         


                    Ivan

The word for it is painted fire,
a visiting intelligence.
    It casts a shade.
It leaves us in the sun.
    It takes us out of town
where our inheritance is hid.
    What silence
      underwrites
the motel sunset silent h in John.


                    Janelle

Your family’s so poor
you take turns
who gets to sit
    at dinnertime
sang the schoolyard,
    and I bet you eat
    your rice and butterpats
with your shirt tucked in
like this, sang the schoolyard,
    and I bet your turn
is Monday or
    I bet your turn is Tuesday,
    and Janelle said yes
but Sunday is the Lord’s.


                    Janelle

Weed tree grew in the lot
grew tall past all election
grew long and quiet like
an accordion hung from a tree
grew long and silent
like the man from Gunnison
And it hid the moon from view
like backs of frogs in culverts
hide the reflection of the moon
And one summer it grew close enough
to rub against the windowpane,
a sound like someone
in the next room saying a name,
not her own, some other girl’s––


                    Joanne

I liked that shift. I like the morning
    generally. But when it closed
they laid us off,
they let us go
    to sleep like herons
    standing up, like sidearms strapped outside,
to go on foot
    or tall and smooth and dead as trees.
And where to put the daytime now.
and what to neaten, what to throw.
        ‘The casino down the road is closed,’
        the kids shout,
        shouting down the road.


                    Juan

I swept the yard of West Mcfarland,
I raked the lawn of the Twin Moon Motel.
I fell from the roof and won’t return.
Mother, father. Vote for me.


                    June

You have my ID, she said.
I don’t, he said.
But I just gave it to you, she said.
    I don’t have it, he said.
And the line grew and grew
out the door and down the street
        and preparedness, and patience and
            the salt of the difference
and neglect enough to tame
the edifice
On the first morning of the world.

 

---

The Book of John begins––at least in English translation, where the tricky Greek logosis rendered “the word”––with a reversal of Genesis. Not “in the beginning God made,” but “in the beginning was the word.” And as if this weren’t enough: “the word was with God.” And then: “the word was God.” John’s gambit would turn our ipso facto upside down. Now it’s the signifier that comes first.

I first encountered the Book of John as a kid, probably in the small evangelical church I grew up attending––a building from the fifties, painted clapboard white in its reach to some schoolhouse fantasy of the nineteenth century, but equipped with the insulation-pink carpeting and mauve low-gloss linoleum of the Eisenhower-to-Reagan sensorium. It stood a beneficiary in our small town, drowsily innocent of its capital equipoise; not an actor in the world but an expectant, nestled in oblivious plenitude, waiting for the word to find it, wake it, make it live.  

None of this, of course, was I consciously aware of at the time. But I did know I was wary of the Book of John. I was also fascinated by it, as one is fascinated by a stranger’s body odor. It was a little off. I preferred words to come after people, animals, and things, not before them––that words be the issue of what is and not the other way around.

But in John’s backward chronotope, the word careened around like Mr. Magoo in the formless void, in search of a thing to yoke to. And there was much that it could yoke to: not only the John of the Gospels, or Revelation, but also what johncan mean––among other things a particle in that lovely word, so much superior to “porta-potty” that by using it one literally improved the experience of a portable toilet (I am speaking here of the “porta-john”). Or as I learned a little later: a man who solicits a sex-worker and who is, in balance of vice law, moral viciousness, and social order, himself immune––an absent X in the economy of which he is a cause.

Sounds, syllables, words are not, of course, formless. They are things that exist, have shape and content and ideation. They can be misheard, misspoke, misunderstood. Which is one way we know––by this negative discernment––that they are real. We don’t know what a word is, exactly, but the point is––it is. And of course, too, in the book of Genesis, the universe begins from a speech act: “let there be light.” So maybe the reversal of order that John’s gospel initiates is more accurately understood as a restatement of that order, a Neoplatonist update for that newer era of insecurity we now call “late antiquity.”

This is a Mr. Magoo of an epilogue for the series of little poems (“The book of John”) that precede it. I hope you can think of these poems like the serial panels in a cartoon. And I hope you can think of the cartoon as a whole––to take the metaphor of form an iteration further––as a map: a map of places where the word has bumped into a node or wrinkle of reality, and tried to found a story there.

The series of poems ends pretty arbitrarily, as you might have noticed, but could keep going for many pages––if only because there are more than seventy variants to the name “John” across many languages, and still more variants if we consider the ‘feminine’ ending. Some say, however, the world will end in fire.