Gerard Sarnat

Old Testament Genesis

The earth breathed softly, dying or dead.
It is said our planet swayed silently,
restless in her stillness. Waters gathered,
one single singing sea, calm. Truly nothing
was that otherwise might’ve been –
except everlasting thunder and lightening.
Omniscient heavens were lonely above this void:
no human or beast, fowl or fish, crab or tree,
stone or bush, cast shadows yet.

Then the seventh angel from a seventh sun
trumpeted a single star falling to earth.
After which the primordial dance began,
gnawing acid, sucking leaches, everything
now about genitals and brains, tears and rage,
cunning and flying, as sister and brother woke.
Was it Eve who spoke first to Adam?
“Damn it, be a man, not a bloody lamb!
Winners don’t shiver, losers’re devoured.
Eat this apple, hon; no one can do it like you!”

Look in the distance to the end of the world.
Time tumbles; copper clouds race cirrusly.
Lava rises from blue streams; edges crumble,
boil over. Birches burn like matchsticks.
Snowcapped sierras molt tinsel towns into glass.
Pewter bells toll then collapse into liquid hell.
Golden calves split open: divisions of
fire ants file by, digesting bullioned flanks.
Black widow spiders claw entwined lovers’ entrails.
Oxygen is sparse as madhatter beggars’ soles.
Quicksilver freezes fleeing children in place.
Virgins are cast rock-solid in mercury forests;
cataracts of volcanic ash blind their millstoned eyes…

Day melts into night.
Dread seizes my heart into iron.
I sleepwalk oval hangovers that swallow your soul.
Trudging in overalls, hocking graveyard coughs,
flash-in-the-pan prophets on fools’ errands
whimper insanely to no sycophant in particular,
“The trick’s between the thighs, not the minds.
“Geld me, compel me to lay down in lime,
mail me to Dachau in a boxcar.”

Gerard Sarnat is a family-man, seeker, and Jewbu, physician to the homeless, past CEO and Stanford professor and virginal poet at the tender age of sixty-two. He is published or forthcoming in fiftysome journals during the first half of 2008. California Institute of Arts and Letters’ Pessoa Press will publish his first book. Gerry’s listed in Poets and Writers in Creative Nonfiction and Poetry.

Enoch

Victor D. Infante

“Thomas Paine is too dangerous a figure to memorialize.”
- U.S. Congressman, overheard on NPR, 1994

When we gathered their remains we burned their boats.
This was in the first city, first crucible of plagues-

All cities are one city, golems carved from the nearness of flesh;
the proximity of breath and intermingled dreams.
In artificial night we catch each other
out of corners of our eyes, lingering like ghosts
with unkept promises.

This is the litany of madmen:
one gathers rubies, shatters them at midnight masses;
one is the wind, clearing dust from shop-front sidewalks.
one buys a gun, and is content.

There is no color for my sky, but I can taste its silt,
ashen on my tongue. This place was never mine to name-

All revolutions are one revolution,
same scattering of blood and feathers. We spoke in
the tongues of angels once. Our language was liquid.

If you take these things as Gospel, so to speak,
our history is the repetition of Creation and the Fall.
Enoch was a murderer’s creation, or so I’m told.
Little has changed.

I believe in a land to which I am anonymous,
I remember winter—

When the first boats arrived we pushed them back to sea;
Held my hands to the fire for warmth, recollected
abstract nouns that represent what’s lost:

“To put aside the condition of seeing one’s self
reflected in the eyes of huddled strangers; to act
in spite of fear of rotting limbs, association of
ourselves and famished skin.”

The scar on my forehead is a childhood injury,
and I have murdered no one.

Victor Infante is a poet, journalist, and editor of The November 3rd Club. The above poem appears in his book of poetry, “City of Insomnia” (2008, Write Bloody Publishing). To learn more about him, be sure to read our interview with him: Spotlight! The November 3rd Club.