As a child knelt in a cedar-chest apse,
made small before figures in stained glass,
I directed my fingers in drawing
the world, while eyes at keyhole height
learnt it slowly through the gaps.
Too young to glean truth from far-off frames,
on living room mantels, in mythic names
I worshiped icons while purblind
beneath the brightest kerosene.
Someone must have believed in God—
if only during holidays—because somewhere
we inherited the urge to say grace,
but the last name writ in the family Bible
is from 1928. If any entity once lived
in clasped hands around the American table,
it has surely long-since died, obliterated
by the worst of humankind,
made kindling to an unforgiving fire.
The hand that holds the brush hovers still,
wondering what portrait to paint of it all
from the toy gun and the real one,
the inlaid horse-hilt fighting knife,
marbles, thimbles, a lone shoelace,
a hundred unused greeting cards
packed like dirt around the trinitite,
as if purchased platitudes might put to bed
the monster of mere atoms awoken by men.
Does anything linger in the uprooted aspen potted
in our yard? What is left to stitch back to life
when all of the moths have gone and died?
How precious the paper-winged scapegoat must seem
for putting holes in history, and pulling hands out clean,
when God demands answers for why nothing flickers
in the pilot light vigil on the old gas stove
left burning, before, to heat a near-empty home.
Either temptation or obligation
will render us as the impressionist does,
fudging out the flaws in strokes over-light,
imitating the simplicity and goodness
of a child’s estimation—of a line-art led life.
Details are lost in the folds of a triptych,
dust is collected, paint thins away,
till I’ll wonder if turpentine runs in our veins—
an inevitable pollution, the bleeding of things inhuman,
the far reaches of pollen shaken off the petals
of a flower forged for war.
As a woman enclosed in the white-picket altar,
I know you like history knows human apparitions
emblazoned on concrete, like glass within glass,
a little, yellowed, radiation globe
of frozen sand grains instead of snow.
The relic is shaken from its chest of stillness,
I wake atrophied fingers from their long rest,
and rise to eye level with what waits above me—
only to find that light had been paid
as a portion of our penance,
taking with it answers to the great mysteries,
and faces long awaited loom less familiar
without the battery-powered glow of naivety.
