Restoring the Fourteen Stations of the Cross, and: Phrenology 101

Restoring the Fourteen Stations of the Cross

I looked down on a mountain, on a cry rising up from the cracked earth. I looked down on the swine and the cattle and they moaned a little. And I looked down on the tiny beings with their tiny tools, and a few looked back and shuddered. I looked on their blades slung low on their hips, their ropes and whips, their hem-stained gowns, their filthy scrolls, their field of white crosses. And it was good. And I looked down then on a shepherd lost. I moved over his path in the dust, and it vanished under my great fist. He stumbled. He bled over stones and this too was good. Everything was as it should be. I painted him pale and thin as parchment. I drained blood from his crown thick and dark like oxblood. When it was over his nimbus crumbled in my fingers. And when he looked up into the firmament-I withdrew from him, from all of them.

Phrenology 101

I

I find an old metal scale in a graveyard

lay my hand on it for warmth.

I know my hand is heavy-the other side sails upward and clanks.

Next to me, you read from an old book:To measure one's morality-map the landscape of the skull.

Carved into the smallest stone-Beloved Daughter 1860-1861our little crocus in the snow.

One section of the skull is called Sublimity.

I press my palm to the little mound.

II

Pools of light drip through the junipers.

The ghosts of small animalsdart from stone to stone.

What balances their deaths?A handful of teeth?An arctic flower?

A madrigal wrung from the bottom of a ravening hole?

I turn my ear to the ground.

III

I remember you standingover your mother's body, hand

on her forehead, your eyesgrowing fern-like.

It still survivesin a fragmentary form of divination,

When I touched your skull, tracedits hills and craters, I saw you

balance a peach on a knife.

IV

The top section of the skull is labeled Wonderand cannot be measured unless the windows are open.

What shape the soul takes when it sails?An oubliette? A blown-out egg? a disc of lightrising skyward, clanking into wherever there is to get to?

Will it ricochet off the great engine overhead?Another scale? And, who records such things?

I dig a small hole by the gravestone.

V

With knowledge man may judge himself,thus I've mapped the way-

I lay my head like a hive in your hands.

VI

Late sun and leaves throwa lace shawl over our shoulders.

Time lines melt in our books.

Soon the moon will bare its skulland we'll long to press our fingers to it.

VII

Already, the hawks have found us.

VIII

Beloved Husband, souls are like birdsflying overhead this very afternoon,

though I haven't seen one of them,or felt the fluted architecture of their bones,

or held their tiny skulls like walnutsin between my thumb and forefinger,

I hear them crying just the same.