Broken Hallelujah: New and Selected Poems

A Song for Easter

47 A Song for Easter I couldn’t think of Jesus for thinking of water, so I went down where sun gave way to cedar, and fit my body to a curl of stone not carved for my body, or for anyone, but carved by water. And I let the creek explain the creek, three yesterdays of rain in one long artery of voice and fall, a voice like friend’s voices in the hall in memory, that day you can’t recall whether they came on in the half-open door or what happened next. Where was the water’s voice before? How could the rain have held off speaking these three days, as if to think of mysteries of meaning and delay in the deep ground, and get them right before it made a sound? And yet there was no more thought than there is speech. There’s nothing here to memorize or teach, nothing to carry off in a formula or tune. Only the morning heightening to noon: the comma gaudy on a rack of bonewhite fallen sycamore, chameleon-stir, jay-call, a wet spot drying . . . flit, stop, chirr, and change. But the light, nailed to the water’s change, stays, burning, an emblem, does not derange or fail, and surely there is a voice, or a choir of voices: I am that fountain whose desire is fountaining, the fountain of desire . . . Bubbles dance, translucent spheres, jewels that chance might swivel its movement on, in a backswirled slide over stone. Down in her muddy world, a crawdad waits, claws ready, under a rotted leaf-edge. And the light does change, the uncertainly fretted voice alters its unstable note in the creek’s self-altering throat. There’s sun. And water. Wide moments that have no center. 48 Too many lives to rescue, or to enter. Nothing can save them, not even the water’s Eloi, commending its last energy to the sky. Everything’s lost and nothing sacrified. There’s no Christ here. And nothing here but Christ. ...