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The
Jesus Year
I.
In the
beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word
was God.
His name
tastes like call whiskey after eight o'clock,
Earl Grey tea
with a splash of milk and sugar on a rainy afternoon,
And a
McDonald's Coke from the drive-through window before the
morning
rush,
All at the same time.
In a swirling
sweet warm colliding front of bacon and eggs and toast
and
buttered grits;
Hanging thick along the strip in Essex
when the tide changes;
Prying through a crack in the
passenger-side window at 65mph on I-10
East in New
Orleans:
Something lingers everywhere He has been and
everywhere he will be.
The name
springs forth from any native tongue
Like a cheetah tangoing
with an elephant.
Like a C major chord or the F# scale
flushing out from a 1960's rock n'
roll band organ-
Oh, to
part both lips and push His name into melody and harmony.
How two
bodies holding on for dear life feel like one.
When fingers
finger chin-whiskers on the third day since the last growth
met
a Gillette guillotine.
Where bare feet and palms wear through
from climbing an old oak tree in
a backyard on Abita Rd.
There
is He sundered in sweet surrender.
All of this
is reflected in the opaque glowing orb where lives the man
in
the moon,
In the climbing cumulus cloud the Cessna 152 banks
around,
In the eyes of that Afghani girl on that cover of
National Geographic.
I can see Him 360 different ways 365
times over; in perpetuam rei
memoriam.
II.
It
Was the
year 2000
When I turned 33
And wondered
If
I would
die
Before my time
A mendicant
In
The chance I
mistook my calling
To be just another sinner
Rather than
the returned Messiah
Id
III.
I, once upon
a familiar place
of guardian angels and holy ghosts,
dared
stare into his hanging face
and look for something more than
most;
What hoped a
boy of five or six
to bring down from the crucifix?
I, torn away
from childhood plays
in surrounding thicket and backyard
field,
did soon overcome his Medusa's gaze
to look for
something else to yield;
What hoped a
boy of five or six
to bring down from the crucifix?
I, now tossed
and listing in my thirty-sixth sea
far from guardian angels
and holy ghosts,
dare stare into my hanging mirror at me
and
find there something more than most:
In a giving
tree of leaves and sticks
a boy played up in his crucifix.
IV.
The reason a
dog won't hold eye contact with me;
the reason I cannot stare
into the reflection of my eyes in a mirror;
the reason I am
drawn first to myself in a photograph;
the reason we never
look at each other anymore.
All: the face of God is ours.
So
beautiful.
So grotesque.
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