Sample Poems by David Feela
A Marriage Therapist Discusses Adam & Eve
Her initial complaint
was based on a lack of choice,
a resentment she harbored
until the day she died.
Adam, after all, was
the only available man.
She took him for better
but felt she got all the worse.
He didn’t share her grievance.
In fact, he couldn’t believe his luck.
He awoke from a nap
to find his first woman
naked and toting lunch.
Naturally, Adam wasn’t perfect
but he went on and on
about the snake,
as if Eve was the cold-blooded one.
And truth be told,
Eve liked the snake,
maybe even better than Adam.
Thought it at least understood
how to have a conversation.
In the end, of course, it was
a beginning.
The two reconciled, had kids,
went into business together:
Paradise Tours.
All their customers wanted to buy
a few acres and build
but in Eden the covenants were explicit:
no people.
Calendar
A paper portal hangs on my wall
and there, most days, I consider
the future. Of all that might happen
I ponder the predictable:
Dentist on Tuesday,
Denver on the 29th.
In other places, through other calendars,
my arrival can be expected.
Those who want to see into
their futures may also see into mine.
We are travelers
in time, sharing capsules
that from most perspectives
appear exactly the same.
And in truth, they are.
No different than the boxes
where we live,
our numbers scratched in a corner,
the names and the places
where we will have to be
already on the next page,
looking forward to seeing us again.
Down Under
He stopped coming to the office that was his head and went to live among the aborigines of his heart. It was the drumbeat that first attracted his attention, a crude throb that called him away from his skull’s fluorescent lighting and took him into the jungle of emotions he had habitually ignored. His colleagues noticed how his body recently came to rest like an abandoned vehicle behind its desk, his eyes vacantly staring at the computer screen, his necktie tightened all day like a garrote. They guessed he was having trouble at home or maybe it was a classic case of substance abuse. Yes, the office concluded, oh yes, it was a tragedy in the works, a destiny to be left alone.
In the jungle, however, life could be located by following the pulse, a song that never ceased. Here he had decorated his skin with a pigment of berry juice and refused to wear any clothing. Exotic birds filled the canopy above him—birds he’d never noticed while he lived up there—and their strange and beautiful calls caused him to spend hours listening instead of speaking. He smelled like smoke from a campfire, he slept on a grass mat, he ate with his fingers. Sunlight and rain fell in equal portions through the protective layering of leaves so that he basked and shivered in equal degrees. No, he wasn’t going back to defend anything. He would stay in this primitive place beside the cascade of his blood, eating his own heart like a pomegranate, sacrificing his reason on the altar of his knees.
The Immaculate Heart
In the back of the classroom Christ offers his heart
to the students whose faces are turned away.
He holds it in his hands, thrust forward so
the little cross seems to hover
above a crown of thorns that circles it
like barbed wire. Maybe this is a death camp,
prisoners thin as a line of steel posts.
A timid boy whose coat hangs on the peg
just below the portrait can’t help glancing up
twice a day. He gets this dose of suffering
because his teacher values order and she keeps him
where he belongs, on the peg between
two bigger boys. She instructs the class in the alphabet
and assigns each child a letter to remember
in the lunch line, in the line for recess, preparing
to board the bus. When they’re all standing,
ready to be led toward some moment
they hoped was coming, they sound off,
and like one more rosary that needs reciting,
the alphabet tumbles out of their collective mouth.
This is her prayer for the world,
all she can do to make things better.
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