1.
The hobbled, the halt, the hasten-to-blame-it-on-
childhood
crowd, the undermined and over-
their-heads, the hapless,
the humbugs,
the hassle-me-nots. The night
before the night my uncle Jens
saw Jesus
standing in the hayloft, he—
my uncle Jens, that is—considered
cashing the whole
thing in. Bettina gone
the way she had, the boys all gone
to hell . . .
The mild flat light of evening lay
like a balm on the fields. But for his heart
no balm
in sight. So Jens
gave all his money to the local charis-
matic,
and in exchange his fellow faithful told him
to forgive himself. God’s god-
forsaken children
all over the suburbs and the country-
side are dying in the service
of a market
share. Witness
the redhead I used to go to college with,
who played
the trombone and studied Kant and now
performs the laying on of hands somewhere
in eastern
Tennessee. Beneath her touch
quenched sight returns, the myelin sheath
repairs
and lets the wheelchair rust, the cancerous
cat comes purring back to health.
But Jens,
whose otherworldliness imperfectly
cohered, took to driving his pickup
off the road,
in desultory fashion for the most part,
so that cousin Ollie’s cornfield took
the brunt
of harm. The hens
ran loose. And Jens, who in his mother’s arms
had leapt
for joy and in towheaded youth had leapt
to favor in each tender heart, went weary
to salvation.
2.
Having learned from a well-meaning neighbor
that death
will not have her if Jesus
does first, my three-year-old daughter
is scouring
the visible world for a sign.
The other she’s found in abundance—
death on her
dinnerplate, death in the grass—
and drawing just conclusions is beside herself
with fear.
“Most Englishmen,”
the Archbishop said smoothly, “are still residual
Christians.
We still need a clergy for funerals.”
The televangelist’s plexiglass pulpit,
the crystal veil
of his tears, assure us the soul is
transparent too. No stone can break
nor scandal mar
the radiant flow of video con-
version. Close now, closer
than audio
enhancement, the frictionless
story that washes us clean.
Words dis-
encumbered of contingency,
of history, of doubt. God’s
wounds,
they swore, the old ones,
the believers, as now we swear by sex or shit.
God’s wounds,
which failures of attention made.