Two
poems from Andrew Cox's The Equation That Explains Everything
followed
by a note on the author
Two
Plus Two Equals Five
And
so a toy drum equals a Saturday Night Special,
a boy grows up to be a foot
doctor, a little girl
subtracts yes from no and lives out the sum,
multiplying
it by minus one on her death bed,
saying, "yes, father, I'm coming, don't
leave me,"
while a stuff rabbit equals a lingering good-bye,
good-bye
to the one face we'll never see again,
except in the past ( that string unwinding
behind us,
because you'll never know when you'll have to go back)
and so
one wedding gown (packed in mothballs
in a cedar chest in an attic) divided
by a field
(blanketed by snow and unmarred by footsteps)
equals a fierce
longing and yet, for what, the man
who talks to himself can't say, only that
it has
something to do with frost-bitten feet and someone
who plays a flute
and someone who beats a drum
and many marching forward, always forward
and
slightly out of step, always…and so one broken nose
equals the scar from
triple bypass surgery and the return
to a simple way of life, if we could only
get there,
if we could only find that perfect mattress
on which to flop,
the perfect soap for washing off
the day's residue, the perfect moment to unveil
our
new hope in the equation that explains everything.
.
Evangelical
On the Sunday I saw horns
sprouting from the reverend's head,
the Baptist
god left me alone
in the cold morning air.
I
haven't put coins
in that righteous tray for so long,
I've become a saint
to
my own personal god.
I've
given him the face
of a Peruvian medicine man.
Underneath the high forehead
are
Stan Laurel's tender eyes.
And
my body is the evangelical tent
where his voice booms from a place so deep,
I'm
filled with believers
shouting and stamping their feet.
©
Andrew
Cox is a graduate of the University of Arkansas (BA) and Washington University
in St. Louis (MFA in Writing). He lives in University City, Missouri. His manuscript,
The Equation That Explains Everything, has been a semi-finalist here but
has also been a finalist or semi-finalist in Four Way Books Into Prize, the Intro
Prize from Elixir Press, and the Verse Prize among others. Cox’s poems have
appeared in he Laurel Review, River Styx, Witness, Natural Bridge,
Sou'wester and many other journals. His hypertext chapbook, Company
X, was published by www.wordvirtual.org.
"Two
Plus Two Equals Five" first appeared in River Styx, and "Evangelical"
first appeared in Witness.
