Church of the Epiphany

I passed a stained-glass-windowed church each day
walking to Central Elementary School,

midway between the vinyl-sided white
where Maddie, spaniel sentinel, would bark

at all but us, front paws to windowsill,
and the bricked-up edifice of School,

its corridors forbidden, fire-marshalled,
home of mold, asbestos, mystery.

We’d walk those halls in later years, rehearsal
vagabonds from “Bye, Bye Birdie,” piratic,

and sift through boxed-up rotary phones, lift
transmitter, lean into receiver, take

whichever one had weathered best the words
of students to their parents, old ones now

to dead. But by the stained-glass-windowed church
that squatted at the corner, a fourth-grade boy

with sandy hair and too-big glasses turned
each day, bouncing palm-sized rubber balls,

and paused sometimes at dusk to see the colors
streaming wrong-ways into the garden—

a monkish statue leaned, his hand a sign
that read of age, of silence, stone, and night.

JOHN LINSTROM’s poems have recently appeared in Commonweal Magazine, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Dunes Review, Narrative Northeast, and Broad River Review. He is coeditor of the forthcoming anthology, The Liberty Hyde Bailey Gardener’s Companion: Essential Writings (Cornell UP), and he edited the centennial edition of Bailey’s The Holy Earth (Counterpoint), with a new foreword by Wendell Berry, in 2015. He lives in Brooklyn, where he is a doctoral candidate in English at New York University, and is a member of the Space Poets. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing and Environment from Iowa State University.

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