Poetry | December 01, 2001

The Isenheim Resurrection

Only Matthew’s gospel claims that soldiers

The tomb, yet here they are, as big as life,

Too tall for them to wield. Their armor drags

As if on wires, Hollywood style. Effects

The Son pale as a ghost, yet flesh enough

As yet imagined only, as the women–

Not present in the painting, perhaps the point

The Church is built: the triumph over Death.

The yellow into orange sun, then ether

Or bright stigmata mirrors into dark.

About the body now transfigured, folded

The pride of wound and history winding off

And flies the fingers, arms and liver, all

We needed this, so we invented it,

And architecture, books and economics

The way Christ emanates hard glory from

A tunnel he can rise through to a throne.

Christ Jesus, crucified, rose from the dead

The angels (one, or maybe two) announce

Alive. He makes his brief appearances,

It doesn’t really matter, it’s all a lie

To get it right. The points at which the stories

Incapable of igniting contradiction,

With fiery tongues. The story we believe

It’s how we think it was inside the words

Brown gospel tree, the empty tomb, tunnel

The losers and the lame caught up in the air

And follow Christ onto the stage just like

With all the compassion we–our God–can muster.

Demanded empirical proof, the finger in

He feel that made him worship Jesus as

Who have not seen, and yet believe,” as if

The blind down a winding staircase to a hole

That everything, at once, is black and white.

 

Cemetery By the Deer Blind

So this is the cemetery, the sunken graves
And limestone from the nineteenth century.

Dead pioneers, who’ve nothing to do with me
Or you, except this walk through cactus groves
And cattle walls that no one minds anymore.

Were promises through which we blindly tore
Right to the line, the barb and wire, the dead.
Right here, their chests collapsed beneath the dirt

Could not support the burden, or the work.
Oh, Evelyn, for every change we make,
We make a grave. The past does not slide on

The skin off, diamondback, then snap the turn
The way trails take you back where you’d begun.
These ranchers ended up in this mosquito

Their enterprise, the traces of water holes
And wagon wheels, wild birds, and rabbits built
To tear across the jack, the mesquite brush,

Oh, Evelyn, for every skin you touch,
You risk the leprosy. I let you cut
The deltoid into target and the sign

Byzantine, mosaic without design.
The dead are kicks inside the pricks, the tale
More interesting than ours, unreason in

Fat spiders over the only trail that seems
To take us out, if out is anywhere.
But we’re the lucky ones, the damaged ones,

Deer shit like liver, the play of cactus tongue.
Eye peeling like the mesquite does its bark,
I know we’re in here somewhere, like that turtle,

A mouthful bites off all the change that matters.

 

Richard Mather Aboard the James, 1635

Therefore hath he mercy on whom he will,
and whom he will he hardeneth.
Romans 9:18
Tyndale’s New Testament

Gray water, fortress waves: we feared God’s wrath,

And dolphins sporting ’round the bowsprit’s haze

Jerusalem, the colonies, the Church
Where sheep are shepherded away from goats

The Church Invisible, are dolphins arcing
Out of the profane, then back into the brine

That drags saints to the city beneath the sea.
Jonah’s our curse: we preach to souls we hate.
The sea rises up as if to swallow us,

Spells driftwood, the lamb that wanders away: my soul…
I preach, but I don’t know if I am saved…

And true, the crew sharpens a small harpoon,

Once opened upon the deck, the entrails spill,
The liver, lights, the heart and guts, the spirit

As if we were back in sweet muddy Norwich,
The kingdom of the Beast. The countryside
We stumbled through, here present on the sea–

Filleted and butchered like an English hog.
The stench of the Divine: the carnal mind

The stuff of God, afraid justification
Attacks our sanctity, the gizzard walk

These dolphins live their baptism, they arc

They take their bitter diving like a grace,
A grace that breaks them down for sacrifice,

The Kingdom is a song you almost hear
Out of a sea confused with tearing fins

Like fingers slicing up to take a piece
Of what drains through the painful fist: the World,
The Flesh, The Devil. Heaven’s Ephemeral.

These fallen angels point the way to Hell,

The Porpoises of Gehenna. I took a knife

And I myself opened the chattering chest.
Like a heifer, red and perfect, it suffered God–

I felt nothing. My congregation felt
Nothing but the sharpening of steel on stone,

I’m afraid God’s changing his great Mind again.
And the blade’s held up to Isaac’s chest, and nothing
Arcs into the scene to tell me NO,

 

Anatomy of Resurrection

To bodies that had been laid in earth, in joyful
expectation of a far different awakening, there came
that hasty, lamplit, terror-haunted resurrection of the
spade and mattock.
R.L. Stevenson

In breath, or maybe organs passed around

One moment in the coffin, riding down,

A victory of science and the frown

Logic, so that resurrection of the flesh

The cleaver finds the joints. It takes a fresh

No longer soul pitched hard to body’s ash,

Hard stone of lymph, and Resurrection Men

Into this earth of poetry and sin

The Vague Abstraction, Anatomy Human.

“If you begin, you must keep on beginning;

So if the body comes back with its grinning

Is undisturbed in lands unknown, conniving

To rise, just sleep–since every story ends.

 

Chrome Horse

Onto every falling brick at the temple.

True wall you find, the stronger gravity’s pull.

Of flowers reaching to the light was all

Of Heaven’s spatula against the ball–

Like some chrome horse we ride in empty dark

 

The horse that I rode in on, or grizzled guard