______________________________________________________________________________
News of the Dead Pope
Out of a window musical notes float in single file
past the windbreak of sage-colored trees.
The notes are black with mourning. Black birds
hang in the stillness over the courthouses
and other sacred buildings.
At the lake a child notices the sound as if it were coming from the ground,
out of a strange nautical cellar nearby.
The news travels quickly on such a clear day,
through the clouds shaped like Valkyries,
the clouds swinging swords.
On the child’s screened-in porch a radio lights up.
It is old and made of wood;
nevertheless it rises to the occasion.
The child, who heard everything
including the bankers sobbing in the chapel across the lake,
thought he might play saxophone when he grew up.
____________________________________________________________________________
Matthew Rohrer is the author of ten books of poems, most recently The Sky Contains the Plans, published by Wave Books. His book-length poem The Others won the 2017 Believer Book Award. His book A Green Light was shortlisted for the Griffin International Poetry Prize. “News of the Dead Pope” is from his first book, A Hummock in the Malookas, which won the National Poetry Series and was published by W.W. Norton in 1995. He attended universities in Ann Arbor, Dublin, and Iowa City, and then moved to Brooklyn, and that is where you will find him from now on. [For more information on, and poems by, Matt Rohrer, click here.]
_____________________________________________________________________________