The Black Riviera

Good Friday

Good Friday Heat is what I imagine, dust and tension, And by midafternoon the cloudburst, The sudden coolness, a balm for some, none For those who had seen a loved one die, Horribly, nails through his wrists, suffocating, If not bleeding to death, in the heat, the tension. The rain covered the gap of his life, A rattling screen of iridescent beads Pummeling the dust, cutting off our view. It does no good to forecast the weather Backwards. If it was tempest weather, The nails bit the wood thirsting for sap, The grain split with a hoarse cough. Then rain fell. The woods filled with freshness, Sandal thongs gleamed, faces basked. Verisimilitude is magic.Jesus struggled For breath, hanging forward, and said little. Then someone prodded him, but he was dead. He lived. He died. He knew what was happening. The night my father came home from Claremont And sat at the foot of my bed, forcing up The news of D.'s death, was a Good Friday. D.'s bowels had locked and starved his brain Of blood. He died screaming, and in silence. There were no last coherent words, And his young wife (both of them so young) Had curled between his deathbed and the wall. All this my father told me. And the story of D.'s life was told, Friend by friend, a dozen lives. A year later there was a gathering To view home movies of him, and afilm He'd made, mostly a lyric reel Of widening water circles— Loved because his eye had seen them, Turned the lens to ingest the light. 19 D. died when I was 16. I remember His twenty-fourth birthday, his last, The strobe lights' percussion, Zorba music, And him dancing because that was the soul: Rhythmless, bare-chested, leaping in air, Really, I think, in all the sweat and shouting, To prove a man could dance that way, In a church basement, a man could With another man, their wives clapping. They say that Jesus died at 33. They say so, and now I think I believe it. Never have my age and others' ages Seemed so real, so physically what they are. I see the skin's grain, the back's curve, The pools of stamina drawn carefully To contain the world no longer vast In possibilities, except that it Can kill, even in your prime. And yet, 30, a craftsman in wood, One finally thought he knew what humankind Wanted—to be loved, to be forgiven, Which meant to be loved always. And yes, perhaps, he was a little naive. He believed that this was possible, Loved as he had been by his mother, His father who trained him to work wood. He knew the feel of love's grain, its texture. Knew a way, too, to speak of love. It had a substance, a heft, like wood Or nets or sacks of seed or jars of ointment. Things came to mind, they came to hand, Unscrolling even from the written word. The world was made of love, to love. And he was on the road, finding listeners. And he was of an age when he knew doom Waited for him, that people heard what they wanted. 20 That is, they heard what they lacked. The glory of it turned the desert green. The cedars' vertical aspiration said it. Roads offered their dust, their thieves. Cities congregated suspiciously,busy And explosive with potential. Teacher, They called him (as they called others): Everyone must be included, loved, The excluded most of all, who would doom him. They say he taught three years. They say Much about him, that his life Was seamless, like his robe. And, yet, he was that age when, Seamed, you put away childish things And take children into your arms. They would doom him. He entered rooms Forbidden to be entered, where the dead Lay, rising at his call, to doom him. None of it worked him -well. But look, He lived into his prime, With all those years to go before The oil of mother's cooking, the shavings Of occupational hazard, would paralyze him. Therefore, the risk of loving this way Dripped, a water clock; flared, a lamp Sucking up fuel. It became his disease, Willed and unwilled, breath held and released. Heat is what I imagine, dust and tension. The scourging I imagine he understood, The soldiers...