The Bishop

Michael Collier ’76 is the author of seven collections of poetry, including his latest, My Bishop and Other Poems, which includes the following three selections: “Funky Stuff,” “Boom Boom,” and “Anecdote of the Piano in the Woods.”

 

Funky Stuff

For a dead guy you looked pretty good,

because not only was your t-shirt clean

and you’d lost some weight but your faded tattoo

had been brightened beyond newness, restored

like the Sistine Chapel, and the acne divots

along your neck and cheek had been filled in

and even the deoxygenated liver color

of your skin had pinked up, so I thought

maybe the afterlife, which you never believed in,

was like purgatory, a place you got your body

ready for the limbo party of paradise,

but because this was a dream,

we were in a high-ceilinged attic, and you

who had never hoarded anything had filled

the space with piles of clothes, magazines

and newspapers stacked like pillars,

columns of books still in their shrink-wrap.

Here and there were clumps of rubber gloves—

black, orange, lavender, and yellow—for what

you called “the funky stuff.” I asked, “What’s

the funky stuff?” And you said, “I don’t know,

but no one wants to touch it.”

 

  

Boom Boom

I leave my backyard and enter the alley in search of my poetry. I get lost a

few houses down near the Eldridge’s because all the fences and trash cans are

identical. I am alone filling a shirt pocket with the bees David Hills eviscerates

by pulling out their stingers and that he has lined up on a flap torn from a

cardboard box that’s pinned to the ground with four small stones. In a toolbox

I have a small hammer and screwdrivers for taking things apart. Above me is

the sky that is always blue. (This means at night the stars are what I see but

can’t count.) The alley is dirt. My shoes scuff its uneven surface. Suddenly a

door opens, a dog barks, it’s Boom Boom, a Chihuahua, not even a dog in my

mind. It rushes its side of the fence and is so much louder and fiercer than it

needs to be. After a while it stops. Now it sounds like a tambourine because of

a collar with tiny bells. Passionflowers grow in a thick vine over Boom Boom’s

fence. I have been told the leaves of these flowers are the lances that pierced

Jesus’s chest and broke his legs. Boom Boom is whimpering, lying down near a

place in the fence through which I squeeze my hand to touch his nose. “Boom

Boom,” I say, very quietly, “I love you. You are the only one who understands

me.” Afterwards, I feel very small and very large, restrained and freed, and

certain there is a purpose to life beyond the one I’ve been given.

 

 

Anecdote of the Piano in the Woods

I came upon a piano in the woods.

Its silver casters balanced on three stones.

A harp lay inside the lean-to of its top.

 

No bench, except the air, which meant

its silence roused the trees.

The leaves were the music’s million,

 

million ears. The limbs, a hundred

thousand raised batons. Pollen was

yellow snow on its lacquered skin.

 

Like a swinging bridge above a flooded

creek the keys were rippling dominoes,

and the water running beneath,

 

molded to the shape of stones below,

was an always moving, never changing

melody, a surface score whose swells

 

and hollows, whose shadows, read

by sight, sounded a chorus of a single note,

that sounded like a piano in the woods.