... Wayne Noone
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Saw a Fig Tree Son of man, you no longer discern the consubstantiation of the stars and grasses and myriad things, you see no pattern in the swelling and tenderness in a small toe widening to a loss of limb and yet you watch your sister crawl the stairs hobbled by amputation, and your brother, drink in hand, on the couch in the family room you do not see his heart splay out like Christ's, bound in thorns, and the old woman barren like Sarah, belly still swollen as her liver burns and yellows, you do not believe, do not see that the young deer crippled on the interstate demands an exact number of cars stop along the roadside in commemoration of its dying, four, neither more nor less, including the woman in the blue Honda watching with tears like the spring snow finding its way from the rooftop through the fascia when the water runs down your bedroom walls in March while you read by the bedlamp and flows again like the tears from the Bishop's marble statue of the Blessed Virgin in the Chancery Office where Father Brucie makes her cry and you do not know that the lightning that cometh out of the east and shineth even unto the west at the end of time has already lighted the skies and the bell that sounds the essence of all commingling is now an echo signifying a dismissal, so ye will roam hiding your nakedness, not even wounded, not even alone, forever among the traffic. This Much Though Old Buddha tells us otherwise, that the world will blink with us, disappearing when we do, I think there will be this much left: Blue vinegar pines and their jackdaws screeching, nails of quick squirrels caked with black resin, and one tree fallen, upon which you carved our initials, immutable through every dim and bright eternity. Stone Rolled Back Mike is not here, he has flown away to Ecuador where he sits in a cantina in Cuenca watching walnut girls in flowered wraparounds lug chiles in wicker baskets. Drinks milky tequila from a clay jar, sees old mujeres waddle up the steps of the Immaculate Concepción. He does not attend. Despite what they say, and the ringing of a gran timbre, he finds as substantial a presence in this white liquor as in the Host lifted from the paten by the sacerdote with his pale and paper hands. Main Page
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