The only word for it, his white Lincoln’s arc
from the crown of the downriver road
and the splash it bellied in the water.
Two other passersby and I waded out and pulled him
from the half-sunk wreck, the high collar
of his vestments torn away for breathing,
a rosary knotted in his hand.
It’s an endless wait for an ambulance
there, that serpentine road between distant towns,
night coming on, August, the rocks we laid him on
still fired by the sun. And so we came
to know one another, three living men
touching tenderly the dead one’s body,
tending mouth and chest, making
a pillow for the head. He did not look,
we understood, like any man of God.
It was Roy, the mill-hand from Orofino,
who saw the tattoo first—no cross at all
but Christ Himself hung out, crucified
to the pale, hairless flesh by needles of India ink.
Jim, the prison guard, had see it all in his time,
and looked up sweaty from the breath-kissed face
only long enough to say ‘Keep pumping.’
I cupped my hands behind the doughy neck
to hold the airway straight and knew
as the others knew there was no point at all
for him in what we did. After a while
we just stopped, and Jim began to talk about time
and distance, the site of nearest phone,
the speed of the first car he’d sent there.
Roy lit a cigarette, traced the flights of nighthawks,
and I waded back out to the Lincoln,
in the open driver’s door
a little eddied lake of papers and butts,
where the river lapped the deep blue dash
a sodden Bible and a vial of pills.
There was something we should say
for him, we must all have been sure,
for later on, when the lights came in sight
around the last downriver corner,
we gathered again at the body
and took one another’s hands,
bowed, our eyes closed,
and said each in his turn
what we thought might be a prayer.
Something huge sliced through the air then,
but no one looked up,
believing owl, saying owl,
and at last opening our eyes
just as the day’s final light ripened purple
and the black basalt we knelt on disappeared.
In that one moment, that second
of uncertainty, nothing shone
but the cold flesh of the priest,
and on the breast, almost throbbing
with the out-rushing dark—
the looming, hand-sized tattoo of Jesus
we could just as suddenly not see.
Bless the owl then, for passing
over once more and returning to us
the breathable air, the new unspectacular night,
and the world itself, trailing beneath its talons,
still hanging on and makings its bleats
and whimpers, before the noise
and the night above the river
swallowed it all.