David Feela on The Rapture

21 May David Feela on The Rapture

By David Feela

(Telluride Inside… and Out met David Feela through Telluride Arts' Mark Fischer Poetry Award, which he judged. We judged the guy to be a shoo-in for Garrison Keillor's replacement as host of The Prairie Home Companion when Keillor throws in the towel in 2013. Feela is that smart. That funny. Who better to riff on the ruptured Rapture?

To double your pleasure, we decided to include two of David Feela's poems on the subject of Apocalypse Whenever, one funny, one serious, two reasons why we are glad to still be hanging out on the Big Blue Marble.

And expect more of the same from David Feela on Telluride Inside… and Out.)

Judgments and Revelations

An old farmer down the road told me very proudly he’d only read one book his entire life, the Good Book.  His mother had given him her copy before she died and made him promise he’d read it.

“You must have gone through it a dozen times by now” I speculated.

“Just once, but it’s thick.”

I nodded, avoiding a discussion about thickness.

“Did you have a favorite part?”

“The part where Adam’s boxcar packed with iced lettuce got stuck on the rails and the lettuce rotted in the hot sun.”

I did a mental double-take.

“That wasn’t in the Old or the New Testament.”

“Well son, if you knew your scriptures you wouldn’t look so astonished.”

“Perhaps you studied it more closely than me, maybe you could help me out.”

“Well, check your own copy if you don’t believe me, but any fool knows it was from  John.”

“John?  John who?”

“You know, John who married that tramp named Cathy.”

“No, you’ve got it mixed up again, John was the author, Cathy was the fictional wife of Adam.”

“You don’t know much about Eden, do you?”

“It’s East of Eden!”

He paused, shook his head, then spit into the dirt.

“You know, son, when I get home this evening I’m going to spend an extra ten minutes on my knees, praying for your soul.”

Amen
                                           and it’s over
except nothing’s ever really finished.
Things stop, to be sure, like an unanswered
telephone, or the neighbor’s barking dog –
ordinary things that lose intensity
the longer they last.  Even people
like my grandmother, her two husbands,
the way she used to get up from the table
as if surfacing from a slow motion dream.
And the Cadillac with fins my father owned,
long ago dragged off – still enormous
in my mind, holding its wax like moonshine.
                                         Things stop,
and the idea of touching what’s left
scares us.  The idea I had about beauty
pressed like a flower in the crevice
on some dull book, or the Mercury dime
I placed on a railroad track, thinking
I’d come back to a puddle of quicksilver.
A candle at church guttered by its own heat,
a few sparks pale as fireflies.  All my past
hanging like an apple grown fat on its seed,
the worm turning where it’s sweet.

David is a Colorado poet who resides in Arriola, Colorado, a small rural community north of Cortez. Recently retired from a 27-year teaching gig, David was a former “Colorado Voice” for the Denver Post. He worked for over a decade as a contributing editor and columnist at Inside/Outside Southwest magazine and now contributes occasional pieces to High Country News and writes a monthly piece for the Four Corners Free Press. David's words have appeared in hundreds of regional and national publications. His first full-length book of poetry, The Home Atlas, is now available.