I will incline my ear to a proverb;
     I will solve my riddle to the music of the harp.
          —Ps 49:4 (NRSV)¹

                    *

I made sackcloth also my garment; and I became a proverb to them.
          —Ps 69:11 (KJV)²

                    *

To understand a proverb, and the interpretation; the words of the wise, and their dark sayings.
          —Pr 1:6 (KJV)³

                    i.

With fingers folding torn
turf like tongues of
earth in the mouths
of his palms digging
under dirt, by the
night of black fires
incinerate into numbers minds
blown by winds trying
through no fault of
their own to find
unknown signs of lives
inside a crucible life
runs from, blood molasses

                    ii.

bled vitriol, no lock
needed to pick, to
open up about it,
what we still guiltlessly
call love, at least
in conversation with our
Selves, after it’s been
called off, abandoned by
someone else whose waste
it never was to
dispose of, to discuss
with disgust, strange hunger
writing us between worlds,

                    iii.

writhing within us to
be heard, to inscribe
for strangers its urgent
verses, to purge, to
kiss the graves of
Oscar and Jim, dissolution,
disillusion, a scholarly effort
translating the tablets of
Acetaminophen, love as a
prophetic science that sometimes
catches on, licensing poetic,
how an empty theatre
seats so well unaccompanied

                    iv.

silence, how trees never
grow upward but out,
flows of breath furrowing
brows until frozen to
moments no memory can
hold, like a lie
love is made, something
we need to create,
poems conjure in readers
what poets cannot feel,
radiate what graves conceal,
what secret griefs make
headstones of hearts ache.

__________
¹The Psalms, Book II, Psalm 49, Verse 4 in “The Hebrew Scriptures Commonly Called the Old Testament: New Revised Standard Version” of The Holy Bible: containing the Old and New Testaments with the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books: New Revised Standard Version, published at New York by Oxford University Press in 1989; page 573.
²The Book of Psalms, Psalm 69, Verse 11 in “The Old Testament” of Holy Bible: King James Version, published at Grand Rapids, Michigan by Zonderzan in 2007; page 382.
³The Proverbs, Chapter 1, Verse 6 in “The Old Testament” of Holy Bible: King James Version, published at Grand Rapids, Michigan by Zonderzan in 2007; page 410.