Response To Bernadette Mayer's 'first Turn To Me...' Poem by Warren Falcon

you appear without notice and with flowers
I fall for it and we become missionaries

we lie together one night, exhausted couplets
and don't make love. does this mean we've had enough?

- Bernadette Mayer


Failing the Grand Coniunctio
this is the only one we know
the one where we eat dirt
and swallow are filled and
swell belly up a meal to be
eaten when the Messiah comes

Leviathan our heavenly bridegroom
presses the banquet table with elbows
manners forsaken in the end
yanks at sallow meat forsaking
the wine which has turned

no First Wedding miracle can
be repeated - no do-overs here

Candles burn on as always false promises

All the doors are marked EXIT

Still we must try
at the Feast

make small talk

look interested

all the while thinking

This is it?


Angels without knees
aprons spotless starched
as beards of saints
complain of humans
the stains they leave

Overheard
between the fork
and spoon obscenely
crossed
one angel to another:

They call it love
what we are supposed
sublimely to sing of
but frankly all that
pushing and shoving
faces in agony the
cries and curses all
that pulling at flesh
bruised as the moon
this can't be love

We stand without legs
the better for it but
for these we must attend
bent over their plates
greedy to have at each
other again to marriage
beds one last time

And then the singing
begins

an eternity

songs about dirt
about longing to return

how all hurts there
mean something
after all