God at a Book Signing

Scott Poole is the author of three books of poetry: The Cheap Seats, Hiding from Salesmen, and most recently, The Sliding Glass Door, released this fall by Colonus Publishing. Poole is the House Poet for Live Wire!, Oregon Public Broadcasting’s weekly radio variety program. From Vancouver, he is currently a software developer by day and poet by night. He says with apparent relief that thankfully, neither occupation requires a nametag, a paper hat or wearing underwear over tights. Earlier this month he had the good fortune of having one of his poems chosen by Garrison Keillor for an edition of The Writer’s Almanac. The poem is from his most recent collection and is called “The Bible.” Oregon’s Poet Laureate, Paulann Petersen said about the poems in The Sliding Glass Door, ‘With an irresistibly zany and vaudevillian energy, these poems begin in an anecdotal mode fully suited to recounting a 2,523 banjo hootenanny or a party at which the host serves 800 scrambled eggs…That mode gains depth and resonance, turning toward the elegiac, the poignantly surreal.’ Most will agree Poole has a killer sense of humor.

THE BIBLE

Just in case.

It’s over there.

Because you have to have at least one.

The part I read the most

is the inscription

to my wife’s grandmother.

I imagine God at a book signing,

signing her copy

“Dear Eva, thanks for worshipping.”

But mainly I consider when

she may have held it in her hands:

a few times at church,

a couple of confused moments in the bedroom, and one strange time after mass

when she walked to the grocery store

and set it for a few seconds

on a stack of apples

while she inspected the bananas for bruises.