The Escape of Words

Before We called you with siren song hoping
Fire and wind carried invitation
To your coming-out dressed elegance,

You in your unmarried hesitance
Coaxed to dance to our melody sung
Your power to evaporate that

Murky silence which clung to our clothes.
You arose with your coquettish grin
Which albeit hesitant you chose.

Only with cajolery you spoke
And our hearts sang with that blessed hope
That we could get to share your soul so

We used to pray to God Creator
Asking him to renegotiate
Those six days and add one more for you.

In naiveté we thought we knew
You. That you needed to be seduced
And teased and tricked into utterance.

Now

Skin stretched vein popping hands scratched knuckles
We hold on for our lives to the belts
And cords and ill-made shackles that hold

You hardly and blood groan hanging on
Under your easy no-sweat-scarcely
You-breathe strength, as you expand blow out

You slow-motion explode and no one
Can stop you O word your name is pain
You are sum of all humanity

You are, in dread, what needs to be said.
Hollered. You are God speaking immense…
We speaking. Everything making sense.

The Gift Lamp

(a poem for my sister)

I bought you today
a little lamp.
It sits now,
a solitary Mikado enthroned
in a balsam boned cube
of rice paper.
The light,
Tinkerbell in a holding cell;
presiding over shadowed courtiers
slow-dancing and fanning themselves
in translucent kimonos
on your living room wall.
Whenever you ignite
the bright of this
pristine and elegant lamp
know
that you'll see
all of my soul,
sitting still and imperial
on the adjacent couch.

Repose

Somehow I've reached a place,
(can't tell you how… I'd have to be God)
a point,
a locus of clear (finally clear) talk
about roots
connecting to the marrow that is in
all the branches of my soul;
my own mango pit,
my center dark,
being finally ready now
to mark before and after,
and to see
the now in me
stopped and clearly visible;
stopped at some sleepy station like Sayville,
and me gathering everything in
like I was swimming butterfly in a dragonfly'd field
beside a lonely country road
where words and logic and cleverness
might be intruders from another planet;
and with each stroke,
gathering in field flowers like wild and eccentric bales of color hay.
And I never have to come up for air. There is none.
A place where everyone's eyes shine
and smiles speak
and anxiety is in a plastic garbage bag
tied with bright gold bindings
shining in the hug of a sun
that has also stopped
and will never again be in a hurry for its setting.

^

Biography

Robert Phelps is a 60-year old Franciscan priest from East Patchogue, New York, USA. He has a chapbook being published in 2002 by a college press in North Carolina, and a couple of poems in other places. He was first published here in Issue 7 and also appears in Issue 8.