Resistance and: Lincoln Pietà and: Return

Resistance

Birds fall from flight, strike earth in tiny explosions of snow. From the doorstep of his house beyond town he hears a wild dog howl down the blizzard. Two days later, it is silent.

For seven mornings after he pushes himself against fever and pleurisy, digs daily paths through knee-deep snow, cuts wind with ax to strike wood. He chugs with each blow. When he spits, the phlegm strike heavy, like a stone. Bent, dizzy, he reaches through the rainbow of spots for wood, carries it, stumbling, back into the house.

The second week he sits, back against the dead stove, waiting for it to happen. The wind seems silent now, beyond that door. And still the snow falls, buries stump then ax blade, blots even the memory of his footsteps, the stone carcasses of dogs. Falls in waves like plague . . . or is it, perhaps, the final, white mercy?

Lincoln Pietà

Each night I cradle a new face among the millions. Sometimes an infant. A grandmother. The great-great-grandfather whose name I’ll never know. A face whose face is crushed.

What memorial is there to this holocaust?

I pray the faces rise from earth to haunt you, too, floating between the outstretched arms of Lincoln’s justice seat, bodies gleaming with sweat or blood, broken or ragged or naked, slipping between the white pillars of his legs, unless you break their fall, lay their forgotten heads in the lap of your remembrance.

Return

Through a palm-sized gap between the blue spruce and Douglas fir, I see the bronzing leaves of a tree beyond. We’re past the fire-yellow season. The Star of India’s bloom—violet petals, yellow-green stamen—wilt against heat at the vine’s tip. Hard summer, hard winter, the old folks say, as if to explain young death, or season upon season of drought. My hope is hope in the earth that draws the spectrum back into itself, until all things are brown, and one, and enwombed.