The great gray whales are training their young
for the long trek north I watch their majestic rise,
the plunge, and rise again toward storms
and darkened bays where killer whales wait.
And still they dive and blow, spumes lifting.
This balcony overlooks a rocky shore
where a thousand years of surf have carved
sandstone into a gallery of curves and shapes—
a human family leaning into each other,
a mother without arms, her child submerged.
We will pierce him anew
Gouge and scourge
Our churches cloaked
In purple
Again we will spill the blood
And rake his body
In a pause of time
The end will come again
To the march of forty days
Under the cross we go
Split from the snow or frost
Or new raised hyacinth
Down to the tomb we go
Into the gory chamber
In the spike of frankincense
To celebrate his death
(Luke 12:32)
This morning—outdoors, walking—
I count the birds I see:
Clouded late winter sunlight
Discloses only three—
Small, half a block behind me,
Ascending the mid-sky,
Diving, but upward, urgent—
As if to rise or die
In ecstasy, in answer
To what they are and know
Of seasonal transitions
That come too slow, too slow—
As if plummeting toward heaven
Might really hurry spring—
As if the times and seasons
Have been encouraging.
You point out substantial brick buildings gone to ruin,
angry they’re left to rot when built to last centuries.
Slow down to shake your head at shattered windows,
at plywood nailed over once-grand doorways.
I remind you reclamation companies
may turn those bricks and beams
into something new. No response.
—addressing Eliza Winston, Mississippi slave escaped to freedom in Minnesota, 1860
There you were, Eliza,
gold from God in plain sight
No one had picked you up
wiped the muck from the landscape of your face.
Gold, I tell you, left for me to find,
to polish. I won’t say to own—
we’ve had enough of that.
When time evaporates with our last breath,
the air we breathed a chloroformed mask
drugging us from seeing beyond shadows,
we will lose our wrinkled
frowns, our drooping
nods, our forced smiles
and stones will turn into clouds, the wind
will become a cocoon of blue zephyr,
and oceans tufted feathers.
We will rise
the way tapers flame after a kiss
from the Paschal candle.
Let the holy man shear the sheep.
Trust the blade. It conjures sleep,
and drugs the ewe upon her knees,
whets the rite of intimacy.
She lets him cut away her robe.
In each bronze eye revolves a globe.
The shutter flash collides with light.
The farm is trussed in mist tonight.
(Peter, on the mountain)
Not the light but how it spoke, his transfigured
flesh an instrument of consonance and discord.
As if that were not enough, Elijah? Moses, too?
James grabbed his knife. John stood mute, dis-
figured by fear. And I? Well, some people act. Some
wait, and then there are those who think out loud.
Let’s build three sheds! I shouted, instantly
regretting it. What I meant was hold still, but my words
never come out right. When light stopped throbbing,