Christi Krug

FINDINGS

I almost don’t like it;

It’s such a responsibility.

Poems collecting on my tongue;

Jewels or toads, the same.

Lunch becomes a poem

And filling the feeder with seed,

My oral surgery, the pad-whisk of a runner’s feet,

The hindquarters of a mouse found trailside.

Once I swallowed chai

With a hair in my mouth,

Wrote a poem for the lint-thin filmy tickle,

Only to take a second swallow, finding

No hair after all,

Just a wrinkled flap of scorched skin.

To care for all these,

Swallowing them whole,

To keep and bear and deliver to the world

This brood of wriggling, slippery words--

Impossible

As the dragonfly wing

I kept on my dashboard seven weeks.

Molasses-veined, crisp like burnt sugar,

Pulsing with the torn-leaf light of fall.

PROPHETS

A false prophet is easy to tell

By his clean neck, fine voice

The maps in his glove box

And his command of time

Real prophets

Don’t believe half what they hear themselves saying

Smoke too much

Owe on their taxes

Have a way of looking at you

Sharp as boots

Seeing a ways off and pretty far down

Spying what you’d have noticed

But for the dirt in your eye

Real prophets

Kick at things

Dig straight to Hell,

Say, “Hold this,”

Hand you the shovel

And jump in first

Real prophets miss buses

Hitch rides on beer trucks

Say, “I meant to get here sooner, but . . .”

Meanwhile, you wait by the highway

Tracing your toe in the dust

Map in fist

Thinking you’re done for