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Pastoral #3

God must find his queen in parched wings of ambrose paper
                                        in cumulus waves of oak leaf
                                            & saccades of thunderbolt

he must build his pyche from hackle to alight   & he must brood for love
                                                      for neven & bouton
                                                              & conception.

God must sever limbs from pure havens & carry her in his hand
                                                  & in his craft of board
                                                    must be warded near
                                                                & supersede

he must unfold as filaments of desire   as branches of hair & collapse
                                                into strokes of colophon
                                                as her stigma rises under
                                                                his imprimatur.

God must desire her voracious mouth   & desire her black eyes as bruised
                                                                  & discolored
                                                                  incandescent
                                    as bewildered   fonds of limerant

he must congregate & humble adore & evereft more rupt upon a pres of laud.

God must abaddon our hive to more than mite & our nuptial flight sin
                                                          until shivers of grist
                                                                  hum & swarm
                                                                          with falls
prohibition.

God must buzz all over tarnation to find his virgin
                          to empty his spirit into her sting chamber
                              to burst into an ear to hear incarnation
                                        & heaven be bound to threads
                                              as clover extends its umbel
                                                  to a basket of collection.

 

 

 

 

 

  
Clade Song Right
House

Brent House is a native of Necaise, Mississippi, where he raised cattle and watermelons on his family’s farm. When not following his father through pasture and field, he wrote poems—mostly about flashes of lightening bugs and songs of cicadas—in a spiral-bound notebook. Those poems have grown to appear in journals such as Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, The Journal, Third Coast, and Kenyon Review, and his first collection, The Saw Year Prophecies (Slash Pine Press, 2010). He holds an MFA from Georgia College and serves as a contributing editor for The Tusculum Review. He lives and works in Pennsylvania, and this summer he happily welcomed the emergence of Brood X.