Old Confusions

Pièta

Not him, that broken idol of a man, cradled, mute, serene, a child again, small inside the deluge of her gown. Not the ripple of his emergent bones, the milk of his body poured over hers. No. It was the figure of the mother that suffered most, when a geologist took a hammer to her maiden face and tore away a nose, a cheek, an arm no less, before the church guards pulled him down. I am Christ Jesus, he cried, risen from the dead. And who could deny the faith it took, the insurgent spirit, the cold place he shattered to release it. Christ come to part the feminine tide that washes over everything, the animus mundi, the virgin and her one disciple chiseled of the same stone. It’s what binds those who pause, look, whisper a little, lost inside the rock made heavy with her garment, its burial of grief that animates the beautiful. Hell is other people, say the only children of the Lord. And it’s lonely, the Hell it takes to strip away the skin on its throne, and make it rough again. A kind of restoration of the blind, to hammer in rage, desperate to find that nail, wherever it is, to strike the shadow from a woman’s body, blow by blow.

Limestone

Our law was built to withstand the wind, here where spring is no paradise, strong against the courthouse tower, our stones bound in grit, chiseled thick as an arm is long.

And at the entrance a Confederate soldier, a boy—he too is chiseled—his face a tomb of old confusions, of nights he woke, panicked by his father’s voice.

Mostly he goes unnoticed, oblivious in turn, where the hammers rise and fall against the criminal. The last bar closes. Some child writes his hatred on the wall.

It’s everywhere and nowhere, like blood. Or nails no nation sinks beneath its gavel. Only time. The other fatherhood. Stones without the conscience to be cruel.

Lebensraum

When the ashes of the last great war settled on the ramshackle factories and chapels of the Rhine, you could hear a concertina walk the crooked alley

to beg beneath the window for a coin or two, for some chime from the towers of rooms and radios that held our nation. What we wanted was out there, beyond the scars

ships cut across the river in the distance. So, when the man at the microphone spoke with such force his German spit at us, we listened, as if a thunderhead broke

our wings, not down, but open, less proud than nailed to pride’s surrogate, his face a scaffold for the angry and the wounded. Suns fell. Music faded. And in their place,

we lay and listened for the carriage wheel, the bell, the hinge, the banner that chirped as it descended, as one by one we fell like coins, to shatter all the hearts of Europe.

Ladder

And as he woke and the angels shattered into the feathered shadows of the trees, he was not sure: that part about the ladder, did he see it, dream it, or did the leaves suggest as much, ascending, limb by limb? Each a gate, a hinge, a rusted thing the autumn opened, and it came to him, some version of the blur, of everything he lost, to say: let us consider here sacred; there, not so much. And he was afraid, the way a dream fears the higher orders that tear a temple down to the world, to the widow, her love, her love’s confusion, the winter root branching toward its heaven.