Subterfuge -- Chapter One Genesis
by Sean Farragher

Chapter One -- Day One of the Bible

Wind spells quick along Iodoform River --
colder eyes assemble plateau where spirits raise dark
to keep clean the wailing wall and all Jerusalem --
a boundary to animate petrified grass before, before
looms treadle and wrap the wool tight cross scowl
of breasts and loins to keep heat in tune
with the lost words never heard by those
never born in their own firmament
in the soft arguments for righteousness sake
thrown down the gutter with nine mm Glock
terrified of its own dust cap rusted to whelp
of stars no one can imagine without her
eyes, sweet Marilyn Monroe eyes, as she gently makes
God into its own frame where she steps
to find her limbs and face frozen in mirror
transfixed by the absolute Helen of Troy
that she that greater galaxy rides the bare horse
through the first days of Eden, where old
tales of biblical lust and incest are buried
in the sand with maligned snakes innocent
of any nefarious day dream that will become
a painting more perfect than Holy Books.

2.
The empty field does buzz its own hurrah
without the least of its substance proved.

Before the grass the brown soil despondent
races rivulets into cesspools while we contemplate
the arguments of holy mother urine vaporized after zero
and before the zero the lurches in trains bumped
by the locks of time as if stopped and visited
the ocean’s backward crater to sand where
stiff, imperfect waves tremble dry wind blown my
vestigial child I am deceased in this pain so high
again in the lark where the running statute poured
from uranium lies of the middle history
of aluminum tubes like cancer sticks, faxed
with the Marlboro Man dressed in pitchblende
jeans and a curious red stick in his pants.


Chapter Two Day One

“God Created Heaven and Earth.” He moved on
ebony waters rising on toes too drunk to fall dance
with dear Marilyn pouting her history as perfect
beauty. "God was not pain," she said running down
the words she molded to her crafted flank that God
loved so he took her and invited his brother, that
forgotten younger lawyer to know lakes and
forest and the tender beasts that made her cry when bitten.

Lord almighty my mother Saint Theresa dreamed her blossom
with peonies and lilac so the bachelor-buttons, blue
green in eye were stems sucked from the crack of geode.

“God is pleasure,” she said. “The spirit of god moved on the face
of the waters.” She divided that illuminated manuscript dark
gold ink: maps to fancy landscapes. “Evening and Morning
were first day, and Marilyn pleased so the records writ
dug into great continents with magical teeth and stones raw
drawn black into tin plates with awl, tooth and breath
for the mating dance that wets the mattress long after
push and pull twist plates of earth drawn tighter and open
to close again that mighty fist struck deep into the butt end,
which Eliot called beginning too easily perhaps.

No pain was felt when the rock died.
Marilyn Cried as the plates in her dreams with mother
and son became less spectacle than matting rite of Spring.


Chapter Three Day One

Life is a trick with deep scars to simulate beauty
when we carefully match rose to pear and set down
the sun as heaven’s divisor. Let there be light.

Can you imagine the end of space, dim, wasted on?
small roads that circle the mountains as rivers
of high-ways? Deep in the distance there is a
sham of red shifted gray into untamed color,
the shallow of the cheek, and bump of the tongue
rusty steel walls that love invested openly
in the back barroom, as a male maid bar fly killer
faking her male ornaments divided the rich
from the poor, the used from the wasted.







TO BE CONTINUED for the Seven Days