In the beginning,
God created the world
to the Adagio of Mozart’s Clarinet
Concerto in A Major.
All opens before me —
an isosceles sky,
rent cotton,
the white steeple of a Baptist
church:
this is the setting for all stories.
But how to make you understand?
To be understood? —
a janitor fingering for a flipped breaker
in the basement of a school.
Books become latitudes
and latitudes books
like remembering the town
you grew up in, the house
in which Miss Havisham lived
or a forest clinging to the steaming power
plant
on the river’s edge.
I will now list the blessings I’ve
received:
a swift kick in the ass,
synthesis, association, allergies
a cup half empty and half full.
a ² + b² = c ²,
the lines of earth.
But here is the thing about the prodigal
son.
Who didn’t raise him right to begin with?
My father once set the church roof on fire
with Roman candles on the Fourth of July.
Dead pumpkins
melting behind the shed all year.
My grandfather surprisingly heavy in his
casket
like a ripe melon dug from the vine.
Life was grass stains and the sap from
trees.
There were open fields,
then a sign in an open field For Sale,
then a field with a nursing home in it,
then a nursing home with the memory of a
cotton field.
Life in the wasteland of the chestnut
blight.
Knowing enthusiasm means “God in us.”
Knowing nothing but the Sandhills and the
Edisto.
Memory, imagination:
no one comes to the father but through me.
J. Matthew Boyleston is Assistant
Professor of Creative Writing and English at Houston Baptist University. His poems and essays have appeared in Puerto del Sol, The South Carolina Review,
The Spoon River Poetry Review, and The
New Orleans Review among others.