4 Poems by Janice L. Freytag

The Way It Begins
Before you can write, you’ll need a pen.
There is nothing but you in a bare room,
so you sacrifice a finger from your left hand,
let the bone bleach,
then sharpen it on your eye teeth.

Before you can write, you’ll need ink.
You sacrifice another finger,
drain the blood,
then sweeten it with spittle.

Then you’ll need a scroll.
You cut off your arm at the elbow,
stretch the skin taut on a rack of bones,
secure it with rubber-band muscles.

You’ll write for a while, maybe five days or so.
When your pen runs dry, you’ll reopen your wound
and drain more blood.
With undiluted ink,
you’ll write your audience into being,
then surprise yourself by giving them
eyes that will close,
feet that will walk away,
tongues that will criticize your words.

Undergraduate Physics
The boys and I gathered in basement classrooms
where oscilloscopes and lasers were stored,
and spare electronic parts spilled out of cabinets 
like treasure from a dragon’s horde.

There were never any windows in our classrooms.
Illumination came from overhead fluorescence.
On-Off, On-Off in the same binary code
we used for our electronics assignments.

One professor told us he found Jesus
when a chainsaw split open his skull.
Another had applied to NASA twenty times.
Apparently we undergraduates were too dull.

A Russian immigrant taught us 
Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.
I almost lost my religion until I figured 
faith and uncertainty could be wired in parallel.

It was 1979, and the Shah had just been deposed.
My Iranian lab partner took offense
at my jeans and uncovered head.
We measured resistance in silence.

Three Mile Island had just melted down.
Our professors grudgingly confessed 
the limitations of nuclear power
while the campus erupted in protests.

I studied optics and the properties of light.
It took eight minutes for the sun’s rays 
to reach earth. I was seeing the distant past
when I turned my eyes toward space.

I wondered if time, like light,
would concentrate on focal points of
history as it passed through my lens of memory,
or bend through the refractive medium of love,

or splinter into a spectrum of possibilities
as it encountered my prismatic imagination,
too big and unpredictable to be confined
to a scientific equation.

Theology of Grass
i
Does grass have a soul?
Mary Oliver wondered.
It knows something about living and dying
and faith. What requires more faith
than standing in place, waiting for
a breath to whisper ancient promises
made to someone else?

	ii
Once when praying with Pentecostals,
I couldn’t stand upright,
pressed down by a fearsome weight
that bent me like prairie grass
before a mighty wind.
I knew then how transient I was.

	iii
They say Christ walked 
on storm-tossed waves
crested with foamy seed heads,
the world’s bread,
lifted up on a slender stalk.

The Dove
Each morning the dove breaks day
with her soulful devotions,
her trinity of who’s,
like the creeds I learned as a child,

invoking names of holy personages
that chose her kin,
not once, but twice,
to fly into new covenants.

Who, who, who indeed
sends us into the peace 
and pleasant toil of the day,
ancient liturgies on our tongues,

then calls us back at dusk?
Who compels the diaphragm’s
expansive recollection
of this day and all its gifts?