She held him on her lap like a child.
He was helpless and limp
as when she first embraced him.
Her arms that encircled him,
his only halo.

No Magi, this time,
but thieves.
No star,
but a crown of thorns.

She felt numb as the widow
who pleaded with Elisha
when creditors demanded her son,
for now, the angry crowd,
like creditors, claimed hers.

She held him on her lap like a child,
and knew her only task:
to nurture him with her life.

Even Michelangelo,
sculpting La Pieta,
could never quite stand back,
this side of Eternity,
to say: “It is finished.”

Alone,
Mary learns again:
A vessel is useful
only through its emptiness.

When I read of Jesus washing his disciples’ feet,
I always remember working on bronze sculpture,
how it involved all five senses,
and how painstakingly Joachim shaped
Jesus’ hand on Peter’s foot.
On my hand I can still feel the beeswax
melted by charcoal fire and the clay
of donkey dung and termite dirt we packed
around the finished beeswax statues.
Once the clay molds sundried, we lit a fire
to melt the wax from them, leaving hollow
channels to fill with liquid bronze.
I liked to hold the molds on tongs
and pour the heated wax into the water.
At night, we filled the molds
with bronze heated in the kiln,
and then left them to glow red until sunrise.
Breaking clay, we’d find our statues,
and the earth where they had rested until morning
was warm like the spot where an animal has rested.

Yes, I would like to call back a hundred memories
to the touch of clay and the smell of beeswax,
but when I hear melted wax sizzle into water,
I think of how Jesus took Peter’s foot in hand
to soothe his ankle and wash it in water,
and how each day Joachim bent over the work-table
to shape Jesus’ body daily bending to wash Peter’s foot.

1983

In Koudougou, Burkina Faso, flame trees burst into bloom
during the very driest part of the year.

In April, the Flame Tree will always bloom!
When leaves lie scattered on the ground
Like fragments from wine flasks shattered:
It blooms! Look! Look! The scarlet spume
Of blossoms! Why does it bloom this time of year
As though Christ’s Passion lasted here?

O Christ, how dark the pain that spills so red
From every sagging limb and twig
All scarred and gnarled by mankind’s rig.
The stem, the nail that binds the flower
To man’s own nest, man’s sin.
But none can curb the flow that wells from out His vein.
What love or injury, no man can tell
Nor cares. Only the wind frees hazard petals
To flutter in the air and drop on bleeding wings.

1981

When the doctor examined
my hand, like a palm reader,
the white line midway
across my thumbnail
attracted his gaze.
“Something happen
three months ago?”
he asked. “A car wreck?
Some trauma?”
No calendar was required
to pinpoint that moment
when my world turned
upside down as I tried
to stand upright.

I can still conjure
the chill that spliced me.
Beau’s lines, they are called,
these thin scrawled lines,
white like frostwork,
that record a moment’s upheaval.
(Not to be confused with Mees’ lines,
which, as both medical examiners
and literary sleuths can testify,
delineate the introduction
of arsenic poisoning,
or other heavy metals.)

So here’s my little thumbnail sketch,
my life spelled out
in the matrix of my nail,
a woven tapestry of cells,
soul bared to the world.
My nail plate, a living tapestry
renewed each morning,
but undone at intervals.
Every six months, a closed book.
So, too, on Penelope’s loom
hung a woven tapestry,
never quite finished.
Each day’s work exposed to view.
Her search for a happy ending
kept in check her yearning
to tie off and knot
the tapestry
from its loom frame.

The ancients who taught that planets
sing celestial harmonies
were not off course.
Like iron marrow, music
forges our inner core.
For nothing haunts the heart
the way a note can haunt,
infusing space with resonant chords.
Tuning a string requires no words.

Pluck or strum or bow a string
and sympathetic vibration will occur.
A taut string snaps,
but a crystal startles into song
with the force of water
transposing rocks to chimes.

So take what life offers:
then let your voice
transform it into song.
The artery pulses
as it delivers oxygen.
The log enlightens
while the fire hums.

Only a newcomer
will underestimate
the voice’s power
to detonate.
Who hears the pond murmur
in the stillness
before the ice breaks?

We tangled, arm in arm, and leg over leg,
our limbs intertwined like a knot of seaweed
swept between rocks, or like a nautical knot.
I could no more leave her
than a barnacle could disengage itself
from its rock. And though she was immortal,
I could barely distinguish my shoulder
from hers, moored in her arms.

Mornings melted the iron tendons that bound me.
Mornings, I cast my gaze over the sea
and dreamt of distant Ithaca, and Penelope.
One morning, at long last I cast in my lot
with the sea, whose sinewy strength mirrored,
but never matched, Calypso’s sinuous grasp.

We knew we were in the wrong, fighting for
Contraband. What we grasped wasn’t ours.
Still we fought for Helen, like swallows guarding their nest,
Swooping and divebombing from Troy’s turrets.

When Paris stole Helen, passion stirred in us.
Little thought we gave to Menelaus
With Helen’s contraband fragrance penetrating our walls
Like the musk of a rosebud disarming, petal by petal.

Cold Athena’s shield and helmet kept her
At arm’s length from human caress;
She who had burst forth fully armored
From her father Zeus’s head underestimated us.

And yet, though Athena’s steel nerves
Did not admit breath on skin
(For what could Athena know of passion?),
Neither did Athena’s wisdom allow for surrender.

Cold dug
in my hands
like a talon,
razor edge
without mark.

All day the train plodded through
gray snow and overcast skies.
There was snow outside, punctured by
brown ochre stubs of corn.
In thickets of trees, flocks of turkey
skirted about, congregating gregariously.
Canadian geese stepped gingerly
onto the frozen crusts of rivers.
Red hawks kept guard both on bare branches
and on yellow signposts marked YIELD.
A coyote dashed across a green patch of field.
Here, too, there was beauty, despite
the sunless sky, the bare barren branches,
the land that was neither winter nor spring.
Even the wind turbines stood still.
 

Tenderly an Amish man holds
his daughter’s hands. He walks
backwards to face her, as he leads
her forward. She is bonneted in black
and dressed all in brown.

On another bench, another baby,
white-bibbed and baldheaded, fidgets.
Her mother sports fashionably torn jeans.
Her dad is in jeans and bearded.

The harsh voice of the intercom announces
another train delay. After the intercom
is silenced, hushed music plays
a riff like Philip Glass, repetitive
and achingly beautiful.

Two babies peer at each other now
from their mothers’ laps.
The dads sit nearby. The uniform
of love transcends fashion and dress.
Despite a change in key or scale,
the melody resonates
in a mother’s arms
to carry and to embrace.