Saturday evening post

Blogger is down...again. & now, so is google?! But my e-mail works so I'll post this that way.

Planned on posting some new work, but now I can't.

Oh, well.

Here's a poem by T.R. Hummer from Walt Whitman in Hell.


Blue Alexandrine

At the Church of the Protection of the Holy
Mother of God, three men are hosing down the stone--
One scours the cobbles with a push broom, the others
Slosh caustic on the facade. It steams. There will be
Two funerals later, afterward a slow wedding,
And at midnight the dark young priest will come alone
For a moonlit rehearsal of the litany
Of his sins. But now the air stings with the blue-white
Incense of Lysol. Orthodox, these workmen know
The dignity of their vocation. It is not
God so much as some principal of ablution,
Most pure in April sun, morning, when lilacs stain
The gutters with their wind-bruised blueness: absolute
As a line of light that falls through the sapphire pane
Forming Mary's left eye behind the nave, and spots
A janitor's hand as he dusts the altar--law
Of slaves, ascetics, vultures, surgeons, thieves who spit-
Shine fingerprints from oily brass doorknobs: anti-
Christ of residues: slag-dust, the infinite shit
Of pigeons, grease, all minor holinesses dragged
Through the streets by dogs in every blessed human
City--Hektor, how they howled for his liver: gone.