|
Laying the Stones
Take you. . .out of
every tribe a man. . . —Joshua 4:1-9
You think of yourself as thin,
your arms scrawny, yourself
famous for being slightly gullible,
so how will you lug a thousand pounds
on your mortal shoulders? But Joshua
has bellowed your name. You jump to pick
a stone. Rumor is, it will stand forever
for your tribe. When you lift it,
it shifts like a planet, grinding
across your forearm, leaving
striations of bright blood. You
stagger. You are no one, now,
but the man who carries a stone.
And amazingly, knowing that makes
a fist of weightlessness open its fingers
in the stone heart and spread towards
the baggy granite skin. You carry
it easily. Your own bones are light as flutes,
and you wonder at how nothing is itself,
at how yesterday the River Jordan stopped
and stood in a heap before the holy ark,
at how water and stone and flesh obey like
trained camels. And now, as you thrust it
into its space beside the eleven others,
you can almost feel the hands of your children's
children's children resting on your back.
They've come so soon! You watch them
approach shyly, touch it, then walk off,
a tribe of them bending and swaying
like fig trees, delicate and free on the horizon.
Protestant Icon 
Watching him, she feels love unzip her
from her chest bone to her instep.
His red hair God-struck to fire
on Sunday mornings, his rant
unrolling like Greek catastrophe,
his rabbit's pleading eyes,
his arms flapping as though he might
take off. Poor Catholic girls, she thinks,
with their plaster Virgin Mary, their nuns
yawning under cowls, gold trinkets and
such spectacles of power! Everyone
she knows, muttering how,
when the last Pope died,
the undertaker came before he was called.
Even after they fire Rev. Lindgren,
she dogs on, pitying her Catholic friends,
still seeing that red hair, that taut body
with arms outstretched like Jesus, still looking for
a place to put her eyes while she thinks of God.
|
