Claire Scott

Does God Exist Only When We Want?
            After The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats

Are they still here, the prophets
with their bristled words warning
the center cannot hold?

Isaiah and Jeremiah are you still here?
Is that you Daniel living under a bridge
and you Amos shooting up despair?

Moses, have you resigned? No more climbing
a ragged mountain to receive God’s word,
knowing we would shatter the stone tablets.

When I was eight, I stopped believing in God, Santa Claus and
the Easter Bunny. One fell swoop. Gone. Buried under the lava
of disbelief and the advice of Sheila who was two years older.

At fourteen I found boys and horses and Jesus. Looking for
a landing place for frenzied hormones. The last two disappeared
poof! when I met Phillip and our braces tangled.

With no God floating in cumulus clouds,
it is easier to ignore the man on the corner
with blank and pitiless eyes.

Raving about famine and floods,
burning forests and fallow fields
while we close our ears, la la la!!

Easier to blame India or the next-door neighbor,
as we water our lush lawns, turn on the A/C
to drown out the rocking cradle, the rough beast.

Ontological Insecurity

My therapist thinks I suffer from ontological insecurity
and need to see her seven days a week.
While I think what I need is more white wine,
which I whisper sotto voce
since she is a bit deaf, and I have
a flexible relationship to the truth.
But sotto voce still counts, doesn’t it?
in this Gordian knot of a relationship
where one pays and the other listens,
one gets poorer and one buys silk scarves.

I have no idea what ontological insecurity is. Maybe
something like the measles which I don’t have,
but when I did my mother locked me in a dark room,
saying it was for my own good. And there were
these grizzled monsters in the closet and
one looked like a bloated version of my mother,
tusks dripping blood.
Did I tell you I was tied to the bed?

My therapist seems pleased with her useless
diagnosis. I hear trash trucks so it must be Tuesday.
Do you know I put bottles in my neighbor’s
recycling? I read bedtime stories at night, mostly
Little Bear whose mother bakes birthday cakes.
In a room somewhere a telephone is ringing.
I notice my hands are shaking. I am starting to sweat.
Moments dilate in the silence. I will
let her think my problem is ontological.
I finger the flask in my pocket.

 

Trying To Figure Out The Calculus Of Depression On An Abacus

Depression stretches in both directions
thick like my mother’s muggy beef stew
us kids tossed it as soon as she passed out

Am I still a bell if I don’t ring
a writer if I no longer have words
if my hands disappear when I write
and the alphabet floats in stale air

worried that writing about loss
will bring it back

I live on second hand faith, worn and wrinkled
no wafers or wine left to coax belief
my mother prayed on her knees every morning
and drank straight to dementia

I see a runaway child by the side of a road
wearing one shoe
I hear a girl count to twenty
before she enters the house

or is loss what holds us together
like gravity

I am walking backward into the future
living on the shank of yesterdays
what’s in front of me has already happened
stones of sadness swallowed long ago

I smell my mother’s burnt lima beans
I turn and see lilac blooming
trying to keep me alive

 

Claire Scott is an award-winning poet who has received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations. Her work has appeared in the Atlanta Review, Bellevue Literary Review, New Ohio Review, Enizagam and Healing Muse among others. Claire is the author of Waiting to be Called and Until I Couldn’t. She is the co-author of Unfolding in Light: A Sisters’ Journey in Photography and Poetry.