jesuit poetry lab

1/on sight 2/ on bookstores

Andrea Pozzo’s Trompe L’Oeil

Andrea dreamed,

he believed

art was alchemy,

drawing a sleight of hand,

a pinpoint of light, coming through a darkened vault—

legerdemain, sparkling—

nothing he couldn’t make you see,

science was just spectacle:

and if you see it, can you believe it?

all this for a little light in a library.

he would make them ponder,

pull their eyes up into the heavens,

dizzying heights built of paint,

make them wonder,

what else is up there?

---

god in the Barnes and Noble bookcase

“God is in the point of my pen”

said Teilhard de Chardin

and here God is,

in this aisle—

I balance my chewed-up paper cup, soaked with stains of cheap-ass (cold now) coffee, on a shelf, and dodge the store assistant restocking the game section, hoping he will not ask me to buy this book I’m reading—because my bank account’s at zero or close enough to it—and so I’m reading here in this aisle hoping to catch the spirit, Mary-style, at the feet of the master, Annie Dillard, natch, who breathes inspiration into my internet-addled eyes trying to make this page the birth certificate of all the pregnant ideas i say i’m swollen with. Holy Theatre is the condition to make the invisible a prisoner of an ink and paper cage. Put it down, on paper or in blood. Make it real, rather than perfect. Whatever’s left in your hand counts for nothing.