sixty years ago, I used to hear every
Sunday that Jesus was coming: the
preacher wasn’t specific but said it
could be any hour or minute but
certainly before next Sunday: next
Sunday would come but no Jesus, and
the preacher never seemed embarrassed
for his disaster quotient was as high
as ever, and certainly something had
to happen before next Sunday: Jesus
was coming, the good people would be
caught right up where they were,
fishing or frigging, and the graves
were to fly open, the nice people
winging away, and the bad folks about
to get it: well, all this will do
well as a statement of the provisionality
of things, a warning not to rely on
any morrow but to check out today:
I guess that’s why the congregation
never seemed alarmed to be there but
skittish about ever being there
again: after all, it’s what the Bible
said: and most of all it sounded
right: a sky rock the size of Rhode
Island, already on course if a million
years off, is probably what they,
I mean the preacher, was/were really
worried about because it might hit
any minute: but the boats this morning
down by the steamboat landing, now
the Farmers’ Market, bobbed barely
in the boat shed, each boat in its
stall standing in water quiescent as
the giant bulls in the bull barn after
a draining emotional experience: (you
know how they run out the artificial
cow, mounted on something like a
slender wheelbarrow, all of which the
bull mounts, willing, no doubt, to
be fooled but worried something’s not
completely right: what, tho, won’t
a creature do for a little relief:
no telling how many times the bull
has to come every year: but that is
an unworthy verbal effect: the bulls
are royalty, prizewinning ribbons
cascading down their stall doors:)
but it was pouring rain this morning
after months of dry weather, and the
boats appeared sulled in their booths,
adoze like the nearly satisfied
bulls, but the people at the market
were mostly missing, a cold rain,
an anxious rattle of rain on the tin
roof, the greens still not hit by
frost: a sense of an imminence, a
change, snow pellets in the higher
elevations: we need to think of the
power of prevention and the prevention
of power