For Instance, Everything May Be Divisible By Three Poem by G.C. Waldrep

Meanwhile a heart-shaped ice storm hovers over Lamar, Pa. Doppler radar tells
us this much. I promise myself I will not hide from the marionettes anymore.
The monks have lost their monastery: we see them brawling in the synagogues,
cutting loose at the Circle K. Someone has set their marionette on fire. We live
inside a frozen violet someone dangles from the sky and when we touch it another
Clive Barker novel appears. I want to believe in the differently alive, if only to
prevent them from believing in me. Whole nations slide through history this way.
Both campaign headquarters decorated their offices with plastic flowers, only
when the election was over one took its flowers with it and the other did not. The
ex-college president lives in the capital and only visits this town on special
occasions. We track him from a distance the way our grandparents tracked
hurricanes and eclipses. A precise mathematical model of the universe helps,
though even without it we presume some vertical connection. Snow embroiders
the complementary monuments to music, portraiture, hubris, and death in the
village square. From above we must look like a cloth a saint touched or wrapped,
or was wrapped in. When the sun goes down the natives get restless. They think
we know something they don't. What we can do is find jobs and housing for the
monks, because they are hard workers and relatively scant in number. Only a few
will fall victim to fever or punitive credit checks. Others will take night classes.
The question when one sets fire to a marionette is whether it will melt or burn,
sublimate or smolder. Whether its strings will snap. Whether marriage is a ghost.
Whether the soldiers we meet on our streets are supposed to be here—are here for
some purpose—or are stranded, banished, in exile. They speak another language,
of hematology and Riemann sums. To us it sounds like a new music but like most
things it is not. The virtual hand sweeps past. Here is a storm shaped like a
mango, here is a storm shaped like a dog. Succor me. I have printed most of
what I think matters on the skin of my wrists and the backs of my hands.