Winter Amnesties

The Faith of Forty

60 The Faith of Forty In a robe of claret, in furred feet, Before the insistence of the sun Brought back the snow-freaked asphalt And the scarecrow oak, even before The natural pieties of jogger and dog-walker, He would prophesy the day, conjure What might come as fact, defining the indefinite In a warm room of the cold house. It was more to face forward to Than morning’s mud in a cup, a plate Of pig rind and an egg cracked against The actuarial hindrance of the heart. It was more than the old hack Of the glass half-empty, the glass half-full, More like empty and full at the same time, The sadness of Falstaff bellied in a jest, Or that martyr whose wounds went Beyond their pain, ecstatic allegories of the blood, As if St. Sebastian were a message board In the laundromat, tacked to him Notices for lost cats, rides to Albuquerque, Distress of those abandoned by God. Already the mother-light of dawn Had turned on him, in the gray window His head like the bastard get Of a gorgon raped by a satyr, amazed That the balance of his thought could Poise inside that ugly skull. And yet he felt, however restless, However shrunken and unstrung, a pleasure, A satisfaction immense as a mind making The half-inch decisions of its day. ...