Kingdom Come
The last day comes on a spring afternoon. It’s a small 1940’s neighborhood. Through an overcast sky the sun’s yellow thread makes the pastel community at once dismal and vivid. You observe the day of reckoning as if from a chimney at the edge of town. From the small quilt of oblong houses and grassy lots people rise. They are pulled from their tasks and diversions, face-first into the air. A man lifts from his push-mower. A lady flies out through the drapes of her upstairs window. Town square empties as the blue space above topiary trees fills with little human figures. Boys and girls come off their bicycles, fall upward out of a tree house. Automobiles and toys look awkward and forgotten. A woman and child sail over headstones, the first to twist out of the grave. Each body is surrendered prone in the air, a simple smear of color drawn up through a cloud-break where Jesus, arms open, stands revealed in a streaming nimbus. That was the end of the world rendered in watercolor and hung above my grandfather’s door. A picture done in the minimal stroke and tertiary color of his own world, where he knew he might one day waken to a world of quiet presentiment, a soundless house on a cleared street, finding his wife’s glasses and laundry basket dropped in the yard. Without wonder or dissolution he would walk out the front door, look upward and wait. Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review Fall / Winter, 2003 |
- Intro
- Home
- Kingdom Come
- Tunnel of Love
- Exit Now
- The Passion
- Texas Education
- Dumb Supper
- Good Year
- Toys
- Saint Michael and the Devil
- Invisible Knights
- The Rain Gauge
- Ponder
- Remainder
- Green Ghost
- December 13th
- Dedication
- Prevailing Wind
- Dreamland 1911
- 10
- On the Median
- These Things Happen
- White Water
- The October People
- Scene from a Moral Panic
- Estrellita
- Another Ending
- What We're Dealing With
- How Did the Foxes Die?
- There was a Man
- Bio. and credits