Crickets

crickets rub their legs
together in the night 

I am in them

and they are in me

 

merry-go-round 

and spin the bottle

of holy holy chirp wine

 

sing the whore dance

the rubbing of legs

against spindles of bone

and raw pink Venus flesh

 

vampires born into the night

in New York stone canyons

but who can blame them

thrust into the world

from a cricket’s birth canal

 

their day job to sleep

and by night to hustle

with leather skirt and boots

so who can blame them

who can blame them

 

there but for the grace

go you and I

~William Hammett

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Old Hyms

The old hymns have drifted away,
have found new homes and are silent now.
They do not reach the glorious sky

or Moses or Abraham or Isaac

or a bejeweled city with twelve gates.

There is no longer a ladder for them to climb.

 

The rock of ages sits in a museum in Philly.

The old rugged cross, worse for the wear,

is part of the Johnson home’s frame

 

in Kansas, part of a load-bearing wall.

The garden where he walked and talked

was weeded and made into a park

 

where old men play chess before they die.

The roll meant to be called up yonder

is a dusty scroll at the Smithsonian,

 

an example of early Sumerian writing.

The people who sang them on Sunday mornings,

the ones with suits and ties, bonnets and bows

 

and hair parted with Brylcreem,

are sitting on tombstones or waiting,

always waiting in nursing homes

 

for Cotton Mather or Jonathan Edwards

to sweep them into severe glory

and puffy clouds devoid of laughter.

 

Besides, their throats are dry

and their tongues too cracked and worn

to make a joyful noise unto the sagging rafters.

~William Hammett

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Saint Bartholomew's Widow

He was always running after the dust of Galilee
and its pious announcements and fables
and the carpenter shaman who spit on the blind
and threw people into pools to make them walk.
I was left to clean and raise his children
while he followed the moon-eyed lepers
and their craving for smooth skin and prophecy.
A pox on them all, the seventy-two
and the twelve who rowed the boat
and caught his fish for the outdoor picnic show.
There were whores enough to satisfy his needs
since his master was clever at sowing
and reaping the leftover weeds and seed.
Just as good that I wasn’t the one to catch his disease.
And then the whole lot gets beaten and nailed,
or maybe just three—not that I cared, or care.
He came home only once to shake my shoulders
and shout “He’s not there, he’s not there!”
I was left to clean and marry off his fry,
to scrub my fingers to the bone, to cry.
Oh, it was rich to find he’d run to India,
babbling to the fakirs and the gurus there,
the swamis and turbans and the Tantric sex.
Fie, for all the good it did. They didn’t care.
Years ago I heard the tale that my bastard mate
was preaching and got stoned by local folk
when his sleight-of-hand didn’t lift the yolk.
The deaf couldn’t hear and the fevers didn’t break.
It was all a sham, a rolling of the bones
to take his clothes and the teeth still left
in a mouth flapping its gums about heaven
and some kingdom floating in a desert mirage.
I had to cook and clean and work for pennies.
I had to prostitute myself before the bread could leaven.

~William Hammett

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