In Two Parts:
Magnificat and Nunc Dimitis
Part I: “My soul magnifies the Lord.”
Jesus sought
Lazarus
in the sweaty stink of crowds.
They pointed at tombs
amid fly swarms
over dog bones.
“If only you’d been here,”
Martha wept.
He sat
to catch her tears
and add them to His.
“Believe the mystery,”
his face replied.
Her eyes grew wide
into black reflections
of Judean rock-cliff mountains.
Crowds pressed in and
laughed at Him.
He looked at skies,
tracing ragged-laced horizon lines,
snake-drawn and jagged.
Martha heard Him speaking
like desert winds,
“Lazarus lives
in the shiny spaces
next to your tight-wrapped hair pins.”
Turning to the tombs,
He shouted,
“Come forth.”
They saw Lazarus
frolic out
in thready, shedding bandages
He took
roses,
and held them with his grimy hands,
bowing before Jesus.
The Lord laughed and
waved the flowers
in clouds
of butterfly-fluttering
petals.
They embraced and
He left Lazarus with a whisper,
then vanished
into massive, shoving crowds.
Martha rushed to Lazarus.
“What did He tell you?”
She asked,
as her face sought words
with eyes that blinked
behind long-white streaks.
Lazarus near-whispering answered,
“He said:
Believe.
The rose
will bloom again.”
Part II: “Lord, let your servant depart in peace, according to your word.”
Fog slips down
a Tennessee lakeshore.
Village townfolk
rest
under clay-red sundown.
Curtain clouds
arise.
Kingfisher sits
on driftwood twisted
witch-hand branches.
Tree stumps
cringe as if away from
falling cloud-fire.
Knotted wood knees
thrust and break
into bleak horizons
casting serrated shadows.
Black mud covers
deserted clapboards,
rotted corpses of barns
and horse bones.
Kingfisher’s wings
take to the sky.
He flies
above the sheeny purple-cloud reflecting
mirror like a spirit dimly seen.
Deep in the river’s green
wet innards,
catfish spawn their offspring,
channelbottom born.
Kingfisher’s voice
grows shrill and seems to me
to cry,
“Cold waters
called out
all the old men’s names
and swallowed
their flesh.”
Still, kingfisher
searches skies
for home.
Farmhouse lights
join stars,
while windows
fade
in blackness.
Swimming lightsnakes
shimmer
on a misted laketop.
Kingfisher, silent,
takes his rest.