The Prophecies of Paracelsus

By Nick Lantz Nick Lantz

That twig of light, that branch, that

fork, that form.

Beyond that, a city. A horse drowning in

a river, and beyond that, a city. Wildfire, and beyond that,

a city. God, a slippery thing,

an eel, is twined

from our hands. That rainy hum is

the wharf, is the light that etches a bridge

between pronouns, the bottle

of amber formaldehyde, the infant

orangutan, the wing

of a gull stitched to its scapula. Here is a river

drowning in a horse’s dark eye. Devitalized, humming, rainy,

the feather of this gull, this small

spill of light,

the written thing that glues each hill

to the earth, that follows a pull with its wobbly needle. God is

a drowned horse fifty hands at the shoulder. To write what

convinces with

the impossible whisper. After that,

a city. They call this floating thing an angel and hurry you out

of the tent. A bear eating its own paws, and after

this, a city. A window full

of smoke, and after this, a city. A meter to measure

day and time

Adapted for that purpose by the God of our hands.

Nick Lantz, “The Prophecies of Paracelsus” from We Don’t Know We Don’t Know. Copyright © 2010 by Nick Lantz. Reprinted by permission of Graywolf Press, www.graywolfpress.org

Source: We Don't Know We Don't Know (Graywolf Press, 2010)

Biography

Nick Lantz was raised in California and earned his BA in Religious Studies from Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon and an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2005.

He is the author of We Don’t Know We Don’t Know (2010), which won the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference Bakeless Prize. Taking its title from a Donald Rumsfeld sound-bite, Lantz described his book to the Washington Post as “partly…salvaging poetry . . .

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