The Snow of Petals on the Fallen World: Some Second Thoughts on Capra, and: Road Signs, and: The Collapse of Heaven, and: Against Transcendence

The Snow of Petals on the Fallen World: Some Second Thoughts on Capra

And yet, at the end of It's a Wonderful Life,After the clement snows have come again,

And the American miracle of money,The petals still remain fallen from the rose.

What's been restored is the life once fled from,And while George Bailey's met his angel,

He's also felt the black wind that livesIn the faces of these people he thought he knew,

The wind of zeroes they stood in, aloneIn the cold, where they cast him. Years later,

I wonder, when the miraculous has fallenBack into routine, what will he make

Of that darkness? Coming home each nightTo the same draughty house he complained of,

What then? Will that bell still ring as clearA blessing from the limbs of its tinseled tree?

Road Signs

I

The Sphinx

Lying on its side on the shoulder of the road:The bald, eyeless head of a dollOxidized by smoke, its child's brow rounded,Flesh the hinge of salvation

Such as the catechism quizzed us about.Coming past the Baptist Church—WAIT ON JESUS—I'd mistaken the headFor a leather hood. Up close

It looked Pompeian, toppled from a pedestal,But portending which—The death of innocence or its persistence?

The flesh, we'd been taught, is what gets left,A lopped outstaring remnantRolled off to the side like the stone.

II

The Man Who Was Mistaken for a Deer

Road kill, actually, heaped beside the highway,As if in death he'd grown miraculous—At least for the mistaken commuters—A tale out of Ovid, or set on the road to Damascus.

Either way, he suffered his sea-changeAnd season until that shape morphed backInto his own: mortal remains,No longer crowned with creation.

I keep thinking of him there that nightWalking alone alongside the road,His shadow suddenly flaring in the headlights.

We shall not all sleep, said the Apostle,but we shall all be changed. I keep thinkingHow no one even reported him missing.

The Collapse of Heaven

The wreckage of a priceless thirteenth-century fresco by Giotto, "The Doctors," depicting four Catholic philosophers, in the Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi

—AP

An "act of God." Not the firmament collapsing,But the blue vault of heavenA second quake's sent crashing from the ceiling—

Massive chunks of rubble from plaster clouds,The folds in the drapery of robes,From the figures themselves, thinking aloud

Up there in what must have seemed eternity,But was only the matterIn which time abided across the fall of centuries:

At one end, the painter on his scaffold, candlesFilling the Basilica,The wet lime gleaming on the faultless walls.

At the other, the four tourists crushed to deathUnder the compassing clouds they'd witnessed.

Against Transcendence

I

Jesus is the reason for the seasonProclaims my neighbor's bow-wrapped door,Getting it exactly backward again this year,The winter solstice only weeks away:Opaque slate skies, a daylong dusk in the drybrushOf branches blurring in the woods.Do you worship God or animals? asks a stickerFrom the back of his pickup truck.

Cotton Mather, could he look downFrom the tomb of heaven, would be pleasedBy the granite sky, the cold Old Testament comfortOf the faith, and by the faithful,Bedrock, salt-of-the-earth,Hunkered down and ready for the rapture.

II

Winter nights enlarge the number of their hoursWrote a poet with the name of a wildflower—

Of the White Campion, which blooms at night,And the Starry, petals ascending on slender spines—

The sky filling the frame with its constellations,The tiny novas flaming like bits of tungsten,

And here below, if the air is dry enough and cold,There's that taste of metal that comes with snow.

III...