Hotel-Dieu
It’s easy to gaze at the great cathedrals
and not consider that magnificence
was created brick by brick on the backs
of workers, some broken by the heavy load,
some with skills we can’t now imagine;
easy also to believe Jesus spoke English,
if you don’t want to trace all the words
his words passed through to arrive at us.
I’m addressing you, invader of my dream,
with your guns-and-God tattoo, your slow car
driving over the day lilies, circling back
to mock my lawn sign’s love, as if you think
it’s another conspiracy, a flu shot containing
computer chips. In the dream, Jesus
with his Elizabethan English was saying, Verily,
and Watch out, then something I translate as,
“Don’t be a room with no doors, unless
you also have no walls.” A crowd gathered.
I don’t like my therapist saying I have to be
every person I dream, even you, shouting,
so angry I wake breathless in a sweat.
Fear not, in how many thousand translations?
Jesus had been telling a story with more meaning
than a hospital has windows. To understand it
he suggested we check ourselves in and look
through each one, until we’re like those builders
fitting beam and stone, making something so big
they knew it was far beyond them.
* * * * *
Fine
The past can be a stain impossible
to remove, like mold that grows itself.
But when my 7-year-old daughter said she hated me
for making her take a bath, all I said was fine.
Long before her age, I’d lost my father
and been moved across the country.
So when that child said she hated me
for marching her upstairs to take a bath,
I just said fine, I said, hate me all you want
as I peeled off her muddy pants and shirt.
I didn’t know who took my father,
why we got on a train and didn’t go home.
So that’s life, I learned: loss everywhere,
ready to happen again any time.
I said hate me all you want as I plunked her
in the tub and she let out a little oh.
Because loss is always there or coming
like a stain you can’t scrub off the floor,
when my daughter said I hate you and all I said
was fine, and the water was just right
and she had to grin, had to flick a little
in my face, it was a moment to remember.
Passing, yes, but not lost.
* * * * *
The Mockingbird Was Doing the Jay
He was good at the screech but not the tootle.
The jay who squawks smaller birds
from the feeder doesn’t like being mocked.
Dressed in his military blues and grays,
he stiffens to shrill, “Who art thou?”
And the mocker answers back, “Art, art —
I do art. I can do cardinal, titmouse, robin
and I can do you.” “That,” the jay retorts,
“is imitation, not art. Art is the inner,
the under, the true, my many shades of blue.”
After which, he zooms into a spruce,
squawks his air horn ovation, then his flute.
But the mocker’s undaunted. “My art’s in
the litany of repeat. I keep the robin song going
when the robin’s long gone.”
“That’s the echo, not the is, the jay asserts.
But the mocker comes back, “If you are
the big is, the real, that’s nature, not art.
I listen and make what I like into song
just for the singing, I sample and mix
until it’s my own, not mimic, but music.”
The jay answers with one jeer and is off
to a high limb checking an acorn stash.
Meanwhile the mocker starts changing,
rearranging his tune, asking,
“Art not we, my friend, an I and a thou,
an is and a song, better together than alone?