Bread
I decided to see how long I could go without
food. I told people I was fasting. Like Jesus
in the wilderness, I said. On the first day,
everything felt normal. The second day,
everything sharpened, became rosy, not like a rose,
but rosy like a thorn. When I pricked my finger,
the salt from the blood made my mouth water.
On the third day, I woke with fresh eyes. The walls
were pulsing. The light made me squint. I walked outside
naked and sat in the dewy grass. A fat ant I imagined
was the queen crawled across my thigh. Its compact wonder
coaxed a tear from my eye, which led me to conclude
that the essence of nature is the essence of creation.
I stole this line from a biologist who said life is a piece
of baroque artwork, its intricate excess like a fugue by Bach,
who I dressed up as, powdered wig and all, at a piano recital
as a boy. I played a minuet, which felt more like ragtime
than classical. I played it syncopated and triple time,
my back hunched, head nodding like my father
when he taught himself to play “You Are the Living Word”
on the keyboard in the living room. He’d play those same chords
over and over, singing the lyrics, “bread of life, bread of heaven”
until it all became white noise …
* * * * *
Field of Blood; Akeldama
Accursed, we strolled
through the ordered rows of the garden
that we kept, past an old man,
his spine bowed, skin loose and blowing
around him like a flag. The lightning fissured
the dawn redwood. The acidity of the lemon
verbena stuck to us like clothes. A fellow
parishioner, wearing his bridegroom’s suit,
hanged himself from a low limb
of the tulip tree. With time, he grew bulbous
and, falling headlong, burst open
in the middle, his entrails rushing out,
the grass beneath him incarnadined.
We walked over so we could hold him,
stick our heads inside the hollow cavern
of his torso, look around. Once there,
we idled. The garden withered.