"Meeting by Morning" and "Call for Exodus" by Caleb Puckett

Caleb Puckett

Meeting by Morning

A column of mist materializes between trees,
bits of granite congealing on a seamless strip of grass
where dynamos of dew hum with the charge of larding new roots.
And dawn’s dervish wind soon spins and splits the matter into a series
of thin colonnades that barely prop the bronze horizon as high as we might wish,
cirrus clouds turning to verdigris that runs through our eyes and down our necks.
This change, a matter of minutes, scatters pigeons like pennies across a table of glass
where workers tip and sip the last of their coffee and stumble towards the red exit
where the sun will hammer down on their brows with the onus of building
temples for people they’ll never meet: this is how we greet morning;
holy, haggard, a horde of contradictions that rivals our dreams,
navigating and renaming the forms, forming monuments
with all of the surety we might muster from deceit.

Call for Exodus

The pyramid and fish head merge at the mouth of a dead river
in this creosote dawn where the moon swims inward.
And our way around its waning order remains a matter
of half-lives and afterlives, a series of flattening figures
ordered along walls to the wayward trapdoors of nightfall.
And all the while, clasping king to kind to kingdom devised
with the hope of bones cleaving to muscle tones
deafened in fluted denial, we glide among brazen censors
with all of the innocence of pagans or sanctified children
looking to stay the ground beneath us as it withers
with the ash from our tinder, our transformation, our memory.
And so we ask among rags and tapestries what miracle awaits us,
what weight of riches will come from this riverbank
with its heap of stones and cinders: we ask, in the end,
where the temple and the shoal of our wishes split
before we can utter a greater name, a greater cause, call it Exodus.