| DRYING DIAPERS AT the eco-laundr-o-mat. Mixed races make ready
their Easter fabrics. Diapers spin, high heat. K naps back home. Outside
cold drizzle passes through the saturated atmosphere. Sheets of glass
stand behind me. Headline: “Chopper Down, Two Dead.” Sacrifices
in Mesopotamia. Oil drips from cars in the parking lot. And nothing
happens. We go on here, waiting. The sky’s grey light falls on a teen
couple. They hold hands across the street, entering an ice cream shop.
Today’s a celebration of a triumph over death. “To display Natures
cruel holiness: the deceits of Natural Religion.” (Blake) The figure of
Christ haunts the day. This late in the post-Christian epoch, you want
to redeem His image just as his death would somehow give meaning
to ours. But political and spiritual identity here is saturated with a
meliorating meanness. “We reared mighty Stones: we danced naked
around them: Thinking to bring Love into light of day, to Jerusalems
shame.” (Blake, again). A yellow fluorescence penetrates the room.
The black stone is hidden here. A spirit of vision is vanquished. Who
am I to uproot love’s flower-rotten corpse? We are garlanded with dead
things: deer guts, vulture wings, human ears. Christ has been sunk to
the bottom of the sea where He decomposes among the seaweed. Or so
I see Him now—hard stone His bed for an archaic after-life.
|
(Drying Diapers)
