Two poems from The Low Passions: Poems by Anders Carlson-Wee

• Great Plains Food Bank

• The wind is in the trees again, and I’m thinking it’s a wonder
• the body can move. The way the mother at the Fargo food bank
• fingers a can of concentrated juice. The way the line keeps
• heaving forward. The way the child tugs the heavy skirt.
• My job is to look for the elderly, help them load. Like the guy
• who grew up in Oslo and is still trying to make it to Bergen.
• It’s a straight shot on the train, he says, but you have to be
• in Norway to catch it. I lift his meat and yogurt onto a cart.
• I wait as he chooses nine of the least bruised carrots.
• The trunk of his car has the smell of dried flowers, and his
• baguettes fit lengthwise easily. But before I help him lower
• himself into the driver’s seat, and before his hands pass over
• one another, turning into the northbound traffic, he tells me
• I’m young. Tells me it’s spring. Says I should be out of here,
• heading for Bergen. I know he’s right. I know he’s
• so goddamn right. I stand as still as I can as he leaves.

• The Low Passions

• The Lord came down because God wasn’t enough.
• He lies on sodden cardboard behind bushes
• in the churchyard. Wrapped in faded red. A sleeping bag
• he found or traded for. Dark stains like clouds
• before a downpour. The stone wall beside him rising,
• always rising, the edges of stone going blunt
• where the choirboy climbs. He opens his mouth,
• but nothing goes in and nothing comes out.
• Like the sideshow man who long ago lost
• his right testicle to the crossbar of a Huffy.
• He peddles the leftover pain. The stitches clipped
• a week later by his father, the fiberglass bathtub
• running with color, the puffy new scar,
• the crooked look of the pitted half-sack.
• He tells me you only need one nut, and I want
• to believe him. I want to believe he can still
• get it up. I want to believe he has daughters, sons,
• a grandchild on the way, a wife at home
• in a blue apron baking. But why this day-old bread
• from the dumpster, this stash of hollow bottles
• in the buckthorn, this wrinkled can of Pabst?
• The Lord came down because God wasn’t enough.
• Because the childless man draws the bathwater
• and cries. Because the choirboy never sings
• as he climbs. Because the bread has all molded
• and the mouths are all open. Open to the clotting air.
• Homeless, anything helps. Anything. Anything you can
• spare. God bless you, God bless you, God bless. God,
• Lord God, God God, good God, good Lord very good God

Reprinted from The Low Passions: Poems by Anders Carlson-Wee. Copyright (c) 2019 by Anders Carlson-Wee. Used with permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved. 

Anders Carlson-Wee is the author of the recently published The Low Passions (W.W. Norton, 2019). You can order his book and explore more of his work online at: www.anderscarlsonwee.com