A Beginner’s Guide to Heaven

By Jennifer Clark

A BEGINNER'S GUIDE TO HEAVEN by Jennifer Clark, a poetry collection that insists readers see the mystery in the every day, and revel in the wonders of such things as moths, dandelions, dogs, and beer.

A Beginner's Guide to Heaven is not so much concerned with moving earth towards heaven, as it is with yanking heaven to earth. These poems are a gateway to an inner journey, reminding us that we are one family cut from the same cloth, spiritual explorers of this beautiful, broken world. The collection urges readers to pay attention and get to work, "while we still have time to build." Even amidst our haste, failures, distractions, and worries, it's all within reach.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Unsolicited Press
• Release date: Jun 19, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393210399

Book preview

Contents

The World Singing

Storming Versailles

Field Guide to Widows and Crows

The Ecology of Fear

Fourth Grade Place Settings

Overture to the Porch on Crane Avenue

A Beginner’s Guide to Heaven

The Hebrew Bible Concerns Itself With the Movement of Birds

A Concise History of Michigan Cartology

Grieving the God of My Youth

Cruddy Knees

The Trouble with Reading In Your Hometown

Like the Parents They Never Knew

Castaways

Maestro

Psoriasis Siren

Optimal Foraging Theory

The Great Shrinking Scare of 1985

The Succulent Ones

The Word Whoreder

As Saturn Turns

Sending the Dogs Off

Small Prayer for Margaret

They played Brady Bunch on Saturdays

Searching

Subpoenaing the Dead

Having Bought St. Joseph, I Bury Him

Sriracha: Sultan of Sauce

Back when hair bows were in fashion

Sketch of life form at library

The House that Jack Built

Cotton Candy Lady, Corner of Fifth & Wood

World’s Greatest Extra

She Stops Seeing Her Beauty at Age Seven

Zombie Mommy

To all the B saints

Lists

Waiting and Entering

Remember When Corn Was Corn

Autotomy, Self-Amputation

She Was His Favorite Chapter

I Want a Church

Winter Kudzu of Kalamazoo

On Good Friday, Walmart Wants to Save You

What We Do With Our Stuff

How to Become a Virgin

Protecting the Boys

If You Could Stand on Saturn

Magnetic Findings in the Czech Republic

What We Don’t Tell Our School Volunteers

Upon Reading the Settlement Agreement in Re: to Lyondell Chemical Company, et al.,

Doctrine on the Primacy and Infallibility of Digital Billboards and Such

Obsession #248: Moths

Dandelions

Longing for the Dynamite Days

Oberon, rock the ground whereon these sleepers be

A Bad Feminist Reads the Bible

God of Plum and Thistle

Acknowledgements & Notes

About the Author

About the Press

Bob and Mary,

two of the best heaven-makers I know.

I.  In the Beginning

The World Singing

i. Violins

We are but

stringed instruments

playing to time,

slipping through

hourglass shapes,

all its varnished parts

neck, bridge,

chinrest, tailpiece

and yes,

f-holes,

quaking, trilling

wearing away

until all that sings

is silver.

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ii. The Singing Penis

The water boatman, an insect

the size of a grain of rice,

nine eyelashes or less,

sings by rubbing

his wisp of a penis

against his belly, like

drawing bow to moon

he fiddles around,

a microscopic crooning.

Is every

thing dependent

upon length

and tension

of string?

Somewhere,

a finger

presses

down,

engenders

sharp

sounds.

iii. Wood

We wonder why

the Stradivarius

sings so.

Credit the voice of angels

to a mix of craft and

climactic cooling.

Trees

grew slowly,

ring upon huddled ring

bundled in

bathrobes of bark

against Europe’s cold spell,

long forgotten

mini-ice age that

peaked in 1643, thawed

enough so that one

year later, the tight

lips of Anna Stradivari

opened, and Antonio

slipped into the cold world

and cried.

When he was old enough,

he took a knife

and, as London burned,     

carved from a

block of wood

his first of a thousand

fiddles.

350 years later,

600 remain,

offering up

silky

sounds

hinting

at caramel.

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iv. Fungus

You want it, again and again,

will go to great lengths to

reconstruct that first time

you heard it, even if it means

clawing damp earth with bare hands

to perfect the way sound travels

through wood at just the right speed.

This too is an art: to find a loamy forest,

dig up just the right gilled mushrooms,

rub well into slabs of spruce or massage

slowly into maple. Impregnate it.

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Allow fungi to grow and rob