THE GOSPEL OF DIRK

 

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When we exhumed the 1939 time capsule, we expected what they’d planted: Einstein and Howard Hughes, alfalfa and tobacco, a photograph of a lamp, a lone shingle of asbestos, an alarm clock, a safety pin. We did not expect to find a small Danish man named Dirk. Nor did we expect his eloquence, his honey tongue recounting the spittle on the lip of Deutschland’s ugly black mouth. 

 

I named my son Palsy, he said. And anyone who uses an ampersand is a prick. Unless he really means it. 

 

But how can you really mean an ampersand, I asked. 

 

Exactly, he said. 

 

How did you stay down there all this time, one of us asked. Being buried alive is easy business, he said. But what about air? I held my breath, he said. You held your breath for 70 years? Visualization exercises helped. What did you visualize, I asked.  Lots of things, he said. Vital organ failure, Sarah Bernhardt, Calais, around the first six hundred prime numbers, that damn shingle of asbestos. That doesn’t make any sense, my friend Philip said.  Well, the thing was in my field of vision for the better part of a century. It was bound to make an impression.  

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BIO:

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​Josh Wild is a poet originally from Central Illinois. He holds a PhD in Poetry from Florida State University. Wild’s poems have appeared in POETRY and Best New Poets.

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