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# Two Poems by Alan Felsenthal
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/two-poems-by-alan-felsenthal/
- Published: 2017-02-22T12:00:56.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T16:41:27.000Z
- Description: Our poetry editor, Wendy Xu, has selected two poems by Alan Felsenthal for her monthly series that brings original poetry to the screens of Hyperallergic readers.
- Author: Wendy Xu
- Tags: Poetry, Hyperallergic Poetry, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-hidden, #Import 2025-11-24 07:23 (2016, 2017, part 2)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2017/02/image-for-alan.jpg)

Artwork by Ben Estes (image courtesy the artist)

‘BUT THE BIRDS DIVIDED HE NOT’

The albatross has been abused by poets  
by being compared to them.

Poet’s goat.  
Not through gates of the temple  
led by priests, passed  
from booth to ceremonial booth,  
does the albatross await sacrifice.  
Sea is the anteroom.

The sea, spool of junk, similar to land  
abides by plastic the albatross eats.  
A lighter in a jug, submerged fire-  
crackers. Shiny streams of steadfast blue  
overlap the wave’s face, oily as fish  
eggs to the albatross eye.

At the nest, a sandy trash disc, baby  
feeds upon polymer lanyard, molds  
its own belly into an altar.  
The beach shelters the ribs  
of chicks once they burst with plastics.  
By maggots their confetti shivers.

The maggots say:  
*Ye shall be clean.*  
The poets look dirty as yesterday.  
They go home and attempt to split  
a mussel through metaphor.  
Their beards left to grow, grow.

PSALM

This will take a glacial slumber, to move  
my foot for it suffers. When my foot suffers  
I suffer and nothing less than sleep, different  
from slumber, can take my eyes. In my heart  
is a heifer, her dust, ashes that purify  
my heart for touching a corpse. I touched  
a corpse and it was my own, and since  
then all I can do is slumber. Make amends.  
‘Tis a fairy world inside my bones, keening  
there in the world of ash is an ardent gleam,  
which waits for polish like a smile. Make  
a hill and keep it for the hope of help.  
Never let the heavens, their earth, leave  
you without help. Say I was just a boy  
then and now I can hear the question.  
Where is the water that bathes blemishes,  
how can I get it to the heifer in my heart?

\* \* \*

Alan Felsenthal runs a small press called The Song Cave. With Ben Estes, he edited [*A Dark Dreambox of Another Kind: The Poems of Alfred Starr Hamilton*](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0988464306/?tag=hyperallergic-20&ref=hyperallergic.com). His writing has appeared in *BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, Critical Quarterly, Fence, jubilat,* and *Harper’s*. [*Lowly*](http://www.amazon.com/dp/1937027872/?tag=hyperallergic-20&ref=hyperallergic.com), published by Ugly Duckling Presse, is his first collection of poems.