The God and the Goat, by Rowan Ricardo Phillips

This poem feels both Christian and pagan. "Deliver me my skin" echoes "deliver me from sin," and the goat takes me to classical mythology. The language is unusual -- subtled as a verb, for example. But it's the sounds and the imagery, like nacre-gnarled and beetle-back sky, that grab me.

The God and the Goat

And then the goat said to the God,
Deliver me my skin. And He
Did. Then the goat said to the God,
Anoint me in my skin again.
—And He did. Then the goat said
To the God, Seal me in my skin.
And He did—. He salved the seams.
And subtled him. And Himself, too.
Call it unrecognizable
Weather: boiling snow sidling
Gilt cloudbanks; a beetle-back sky;
Nacre-gnarled écorchés of ought
And nought air; all caught in the thought
That we were the God and the goat,
Once strangers, now just strange, and bound
By the songs of Heaven and wound
That wing out from our one shared throat.




Baaa

Wedding Toast, by Richard Wilbur

A formal poem for the formal celebration of love. The short third line of each verse holds back so that the fourth line feels like an overflow, creating a sense of abundance -- exactly what the poem celebrates. I love the word smack in the last line. It says taste, kiss, and the smack that love can hit you with.



Wedding Toast


St. John tells how, at Cana's wedding feast,
The water-pots poured wine in such amount
That by his sober count
There were a hundred gallons at the least.

It made no earthly sense, unless to show
How whatsoever love elects to bless
Brims to a sweet excess
That can without depletion overflow.

Which is to say that what love sees is true;
That this world's fullness is not made but found.
Life hungers to abound
And pour its plenty out for such as you.

Now, if your loves will lend an ear to mine,
I toast you both, good son and dear new daughter.
May you not lack for water,
And may that water smack of Cana's wine.

In the beginning was the Word. Write one?

You Ask Me to Talk About the Interior, by Carolina Ebeid

What causes so much energy in this poem? It is lithe and sinewy in sound and image. The repetitive "was," "was," "was" creates a hurried feel. The poem moves. And I like the end, which alludes quietly to the book of Genesis.

You Ask Me to Talk About the Interior

It was all roadside flowers & grasses
growing over the cities
was made of wilderness & sky
with God washed out of it
was the foreign prayer-word
it was a list of missing persons
was the solid bronze charging
bull on the famous street
was like the Roman method for making bees
was its taken-down carcass
& its bed of apple branches & thyme
was a new anatomy, a beaten hide,
a skeleton sweetening to glowing fluids,
& the bee born out, & the grist of them born
glistening as coins
it was anthem
was the listening,
the way a searchlight listens over a lake
it was the prayer-word out of your mouth
your thousand-noun request
it goes up up to the florescent weather
was an ivory box,
was hurdle & burn, burning through
the infinite, your overbright comet
was made of stones, made of berries & box tops & eggshells
it was like the word having reached the ear
& the words pollinated the dark, there was darkness there,
like the after-hours inside a library

The Colorado Review

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