We Can’t Follow These
Here’s the cross that marks a crossroad
though not the one
in Mississippi
where Robert Johnson sold his soul
which no one knew was for sale
least of all him.
Or not a cross but a crossword
where the letter that joins
six across with four down
is the middle initial
of the man on the wanted poster
who’s not wanted at all
is just photogenic
and wants attention
which leads to confusion
or in his case
to book publication.
You’d shield your ears if you could hear
the cross words he uses
when visiting family
who hold up his books and say
we can’t follow these
and he says
but I followed you and where did that get me
and they say exactly
as they hand them back
like crosses they bore.
* * * *
Spirits
The parishioners unable to even speak
of it, the migration of odorless smoke
from invisible fires too much to bear,
prayers turned to screams at nothing they could
see, apparitions set loose in their settlement,
unsummoned abstractions of history, rifts in time,
faith forsaken for fakery, their hallowed
legacies disrupted, upended like ships in foul
weather, their holiness dissolved in clouds
they left under, hearts beating too fast
for their blood to bear, their cries the cries
of birds returning to devoured nests until
the spirits prayed for them, swayed them,
their presence proof what they lived by
was wrong, what they doubted, divine.