Ralph Monday is Associate Professor of English at Roane State Community College in Harriman, TN., and has published hundreds of poems in over 50 journals. A chapbook, All American Girl and Other Poems, was published in July 2014. A book Empty Houses and American Renditions was published May 2015 by Aldrich Press. A Kindle chapbook Narcissus the Sorcerer was published June 2015 by Odin Hill Press.
Website: Ralph Monday
When the Art No Longer Remains
Seventeen turned to thirty-five
deep in the troughs of his own tides
he will presently forget the nights and days
with her, the shared moons from month to
month.
The tales that they created, moments of
ice and fire, of victories on the playing
fields, defeats that were ignored.
Stories can only carry so far, before they
settle into mystery and myth, into buried
layer after layer, where they change,
through the years and move us back to
truck headlights knifing the dark on the
interstate, to going down to the still
waters and drinking, to wash off the
deep sins that can never be winter white.
They weren’t really battles, no
dark ages crusades, merely seasonal
skirmishes that neither knew the meaning
of.
I have seen many autumns with Bradford leaves
blazed and burnt reds, oranges, and yellows,
the ripened pear and apple, leaves singed
with frost, foliage like some randomly
thrown design, an Arabian carpet thick
with memory, desire.
Is there a Mind producing a Design?
This is a mystery that cannot be
plumbed, only hinted at by art, and
we never had a design, only a random
blueprint made up as we went along.
Only One Day
There in Berlin with the
city ruined around him,
the young German soldier
sat alone at the organ playing
as serenely as though a normal
congregation listened.
His helmet covers his head,
the horn-rimmed glasses of
a student mirror the shattered
walls, the empty church as
empty now as his heart.
The music is hauntingly beautiful.
You know this is the only solace
left as the camera pans to stone
angels.
He must have been thinking
at the end I want to see her
dancing with ribbons in her
hair, not
the shattering artillery shells
mixed with the smell of fir trees
and death.
And so he played with the image
of the girl in a white dress, dancing,
ribbons in her hair
hearing the mighty Wurlitzer
calling out the end of war,
running to
Homo homini lupus.
Pentecost Promise
Fog is crawling down Fonde Mountain like
white ants working a rotting forest floor poplar, sliding
toward where a crane springs up from the
frog-choked pond full of its morning
sacrament.
There is a Buddha in the mountain, coal mining
reincarnation in the rocks that the women don’t
see. They wear long dresses, longer glory
hair, take to the pews like a forgotten Artemis
looking for her burned temple.
Guitars are warming up the copperheads
in their boxes, Augustine prepares the polluted
drink while Calvin keeps beat on drums.
The women don’t know why it’s so hot
but they like it, in their thin dresses, hair falling about
their thighs.
and the music and the snakes
and the music and the snakes
Smoldering August glory days
cracked open by a desert.
The women dream of figs and dates,
being teased by a mountain messiah.
and the music and the snakes
and the music and the snakes
There glued to their pews
listening to the preacher take on his
glory, waiting the snake-turn,
their hair is always down.
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