The Last Two Stations of the Cross

Thirteenth and the Last (Stations (!) of the Cross)

           

            Thirteenth: -the body of Jesus is laid in the arms of his mother          

                        Reader: We adore you oh Christ and we bless you

                        Mother: Because by your holy cross you have redeemed the world.

                        Reader: Her tears ran down her cheeks:

                        Mother: Because she had none to comfort her

Because I want  

his absence beatified I want it

to prove its miracles.  I want its

limbs to skip, I want its

hands to caress my hair.  I want it!

Not to be! Not this wet weight.  Not this,

this ... I want it,

something other than want-

my gut in my throat I want

God I want him back, alive to me back I,

            Fourteenth: - Jesus is laid in the tomb

                        Reader: We Adore you O Christ and we bless you:
                        People: Because by your holy cross you have redeemed the world.

                        Reader: You will not abandon me to the grave:
                        People: Nor let your holy one see corruption.

instead of, Jesus, God, Mary,

what sin I want

noise his noise I want

his scabs his sweat I want

it all on my lips I want

not these hard white beads I want

his knuckles under my thumb, his feet I want

before they run with him run away with him I want him.

             

Wiping the Smudge Away

Glasses

It comes to this: of whatever sort it is,

it must be “lit with piercing glances into the life of things”;

it must acknowledge the spiritual forces which have made it.

                                                            Marianne Moore

                                                            “When I Buy Pictures”

Until I hold them up

to the light and far away

from my face I really can’t tell

how dirty they are

how smudged with the hike

into the falls and back out

how dusted with groceries meat

papaya cheese, how feeding this

(but not in an order)to the other

three at the table would seem

a sweet delight to provide

to prepare to prophet

their night through to morning

what is it, seeing at a distance

of lens to nose, those limp

prints of the hours, too close

to notice?  Or is it distance

I survive only because too far

is a blur, is a horn hassling fog

is a photograph across the room

I can’t see even up close

or even squeeze a memory of.

There are so many today. 

How is it we have any breath at all?
 

I mean think:

how still the children had to sit

all those years ago and pull off

the glee, pull off that caught

in a pause of thought.  It’s so

honest a light a parasite

would bang against it concussed

and fall to the ground

holding its head.  I get the spirit

bit though.  When I breathe out some

of my sour tongue, when it

levitates above the foggy lenses

and I wipe them and put them

back on there’s a fraction

of clarity that stuns me enough

I drop everything and stand dumb

and open-mouthed.  Inhale.  Drying

my wet jaw where all the cliché awe

is or starts its way out.  Seeing like she

saw.  Over that flat lake late.  At the bob

of boats.  At the men throwing. 

And their throwing is unwipeable. 

She sees but doesn’t.  She can’t wipe

her eyes enough to see her own feet.

Even if she looked, even though they’re

attached, they have blood that moves,

they tingle.  And her cheeks sag

and her glasses droop.  I see.  I do

but I don’t.  I wasn’t there.  I don’t.

Gravedigger: How to Choose Where to Point the Spade

It’s just this one 
dig.  Until it’s the next one
dig, one of twelve.

It’s the itch.

Where it pimples

and puckers. 

He can’t resist. 

Even when every drop

of viscous spit

is gone and it’s nothing

but dry track,

a whole long road

of last week’s dry

peat trucked, slung

in the sun, bricked

high, each precious inch

sucked dry by

the hot throat

of sun whose esoph-

agus is longer than,

more endless than

the globe and all her

longitudes.  And each

shovel he now pulls

up, her pyramid

of dirt tumbling back

into the precisely gridded

grave.  It is tar dark.

The morning downpour,

her sludge, the bottom

is thick custard.  He’d wanted

it dry.  Dry as pressed

coal.  Dry as red winter cedar,

waiting.  Even if

there were flint

the spark wouldn’t…

wouldn’t.  Not here. 

Not this dig.  Or the six

before.  Or the five

yet to come.  The itch.

The pucker.  The mud

and the sun.

the grieving married couple

the grieving married couple get ready for bed

They stood, their clothes flapping

softly.  Glass floats covered with a gray crust.

The bones of seabirds.

At the tide

line a woven mat of weeds

and the ribs of fishes in their millions stretching

along the shore as far as the eye could see

like an isocline of death. 

One vast salt sepulcher.  Senseless.  Senseless. 

                            The Road

                            Cormac McCarthy

the words he’ll never read keep coming anyway

a sea whose only knowing is push and pull

push and pull a man going in

to a woman a woman going into a woman

going into a man going into a man.  but not like that.

ok maybe like that.

maybe a little.  but only because of the salt.

decide its only because of the salt.  and maybe

the wind.

and maybe,

because winds never stop talking,

maybe even because it never stops

singing he once put his mouth against a drain-

spout so retched with detritus it’s almost ancient

Hebrew, a gurgle of atonement,

something he’d want to put his mouth against

again and again, the drainpipe draining

down his throat in words and words and words that keep

coming up her spine where he used to be

his chest against it sometimes or from behind

the way he’d sneak up and invite himself

in and she never said no because maybe

one day he’d be right where he is now and she’d be right

where she is now and no one would

want to touch her no one would want

or maybe even care to hear the faint

radio of a letter rubbing against another letter

and another and then space space       space

as wide as a blank page in a book

as bound as the spine of that book

as generous and needed as consensual

sex the words he’d never read never see

never hear she mouths them anyway she spits

them she makes tea she bakes cakes and meat

with them and eats and drinks and waits

at the tide clock not ever looking not needing to

he having gone out and she after

so many other shes and hes (though never

as good as him and never as ready)

gets ready too gets ready after all these years a thin widow

Shadow

Shadow

Golden chalice, good to house a god.  Please

            don’t tell me how the story ends.

                                                Cormac McCarthy

                                                The Road

Aside from his skin, and how it puckered

            in water, faded in the long wool winter.

And his fair hair curled like a periwinkle

            on the floor two or three times

a year.  Aside from the first shirt and short

            pants I made his second spring

and how perfect they slid, straight

            to the knee and never further, (aside

from saving each mistake even with the cost

            of fabric) I miss his shadow

the most.  Because it was still

            in the room when he’d stepped out,

it hinged him to the floor, the wall…and even

            though his straight from play tang

lolled longer, or his fresh from mass or his bath,

            and that I’d walk through and it would be

on me and in me, the evanescent perfume

            was soon mingled and gone:  that shadow.

I’d step on it and we’d neither feel no crick or misery

            while I watched it slide across the kitchen

or the porch or the lawn or the sidewalk

            or the church isle or the grocery

isle, how the ceiling or the sun at once

            possessed him and grew him larger

or smaller than I ever could, and how, all at once, this flat

            closure of everything has made him   

take his leave.  Of the floor.  The wall.  Even these furrows

            and the kerfs I’d never seen

before until now, sitting here, holding a dust-

            rag in the dark incense of his bed-

room.