May 3 Is the Feast of St. Philip, Apostle, and: The Pig Nut Hickory

May 3 Is the Feast of St. Philip, Apostle

Fellow literalist, your doubt about the loaves and fishes always comforted me.

When you responded to Jesus’s return from death with your over-the-top request to seemore and were rebuked—Don’t you know me?—you had my sympathy.

Maybe knowing Greek got you in. God knows how you translated what you couldscarcely understand, but God, we’re told, draws straight with crooked lines,

a relief to both of us, good with words, but prone to use them at the wrong times.

Though history confuses you with another Philip in Acts, you were there at the start,another face in the crowd.

In the icon, you wear a look of wisdom and cloth of gold.

Hear my prayer, Philip, fifth of the twelve.

Your gaze suggests disquiet can be stilled.

The Pig Nut Hickory

bore between its branches,        at the edges of its leaf flutter,            swaying signals of its limits,                shifting silhouettes of empty sky,

        of where it was not,and I thoughtit’s as if death were the tree’s guestwhich St. Paul says we too harbor        bearing always the death of Jesus in our bodies.Its leaves gleamed            back green,                flung to my eyes                    the wonder                        of feeding from the sun,and the tree clung,    propped halfway up the brook bank,      bearing nothing in its branches.