Gravity: After the Diagnosis

“Can this broken body preach a sermon?”
Every ligament of a partial-priest,
Awaiting inspiration and the rain,
Sits tense on the porch, in the ease of
This day's stumbling arrival, unslaked,
And tries and tries to think of God—but why?
Why of God who made the ankle, the piece
That gives the soul refrain to speak, to sing,
To finish the sermon he left inside
Fog-fleeced; God who made this oncoming rain,
To unease the talused liturgical
Entanglement that ever remains to
Announce the morning, the longstanding burn
Of the night before, the hypertonic
Crooked feet of cerebral creation:
To be and to bear the image of God.

“Can this broken body preach a sermon?”
The one question he asks when he wakes, leaps,
Startles—or is asked too many questions
In a crowded place, or when he is late
And the others pace to the door stunned
By the quickness with which his voice now grates;
Or when he gaits, unknowing, in a hum,
The triumph and the thud, “For all the Saints”—
Wakes to the unmentioned and unthought-of
Years on the Mountain with the bow-tied men.
Try and try. Did God make that mountain’s grin?
A grin of white that now shadows forth rot
Across the nicotine-stainedmemory
Of the eggshelled walls and the trees outside
That tapped on the windows and tap today,
Like folklore and rumor, nerve-length, in rain.

“Can this broken body preach a sermon?”
The priest (remaining partial to the call
That gathers stagnant in the convalescence
Of this porch in early morning, in him)
Half-believes the Holy Spirit can fall,
Stumble, be tripped by the palsied pauses
In this cricket-chirping, sun-nudged dawn-dross.
How else to account for where God wasn’t?
For the red faced cocktail shake of his brain
That shook for 7 years, and shook with fear
Who he was—three things you can hear, see, touch.
By faithfulness to a day he had faith,
He knows, however, that the morning warms
To ease the ache of his knees, the haunting
Silence from the ghost (the man) she married,
The half-regard for his half-sought sermon.

And so he waits. For rain, for God, he waits;
Waits for memories to leave his body;
For his wife to come out and find, without
Surprise, him humming that old hymn again;
For him to turn to her, trembling,
To say, “The Mountain has now grown within,
And, my love, I am buried beneath it;”
For her to speak the antiphonal gift,
“Can that broken body preach a sermon?”
Teary-eyed with longings yet unspoken,
She points to the cross, liturgy’s motion,
And goes back inside to finish painting.
The boys picked the color, now they watch her
Cut in the edges, “It wasn’t your fault.”
“What was this color again?” Her voice shakes,
“Eggshell white.” And just then, the rain begins.