SHEROD SANTOS

The Book of Blessings

The reserved and slightly weary-eyed doctor in the ER who,
having awakened him late, curled up in a blanket
on the waiting room floor, said two times softly, 'SheÕll
be fine now,' that doctor was writ in his Book of Blessings.

As were the windfall apples the horses ate (the trailing slobber's
acrid stain like the wrack of nature across his hand)
at the Shaker village in Kentucky, where his mother had gone
to recover. And the tears of his mother, muffled, exhausted,

utterly undone by her night-long struggles in the room
next door, while the boy sat watching on a television screen
the man a following crowd called 'King,' though the crowd
surrounding did not bow down in the Selma of 1958.

And yet the King's high seeing still gazed beyond the fear
in everyone's eyes to a place made quiet by him in them,
so that the crowd as it passed made a papery sound,
like the scrape of leaves (or, as the boy now saw it,

like the theme of leaves) across the threshold that opened
within him there. That too was writ in his Book of Blessings.
As were the songs he'd committed to memory, the one
about a fast-falling eventide, the one about stardust

and a garden wall; and before that there was learning to read,
the alphabet, syllable, word and phrase, the vanishing
point of the period, the tripled period's placid seaÉ
and suspended roundly above that sea, the fluent figure

of a risen moon, and the loosed imagining moonadds
to speech, the sea change its four letters form
in the mind of a boy sitting up in bed, until the bed's
no longer a bed at all, but a boat whose filling spinnaker

has hauled it out from a foreign shore overgrown with
shadow-shaped rustlings. And his penis erect in a dream
that boat now carries him toward, a dream in which
the towering secret of his begetting is at last spelled out

in the bright pearl-droplets of a falling rain, as though the moon
were weeping on the open sea, and the sea were a body
it yearned for. All that was writ in his book as well.
All that and more than he is able to recall tonight, for after

forty-eight years he has come to find so many erasures
appear there now, so many passages torn out whole,
while in the Book of Death the pages are already filling up,
and in the Book of Silence, and in the Book of Forgetting.


A poem by Eugene GloriaBack to the 89th Annual PSA Award WinnersA poem by Steve Kronen