View PDF

I

What if the Resurrection were not pent 
for the vast reendowment of all flesh 
but occurred as if by chance, like birth 
(that miraculous appointment), and just 
as unnoticed. What if these were the terms?: 

You must die. You must taste the earth 
on your tongue and ride the wind among leaves
until the last, very last, mortal soul who remembers
your name returns to the soil. Then the entropy
of your meat and bones, swishing cilia, 

webbed filaments, coursing capillaries 
reverses itself and you appear, not 
near your grave, but in the spot where you suffered
most on this green nonpartisan sphere. You 
appear in jeans and flannel shirt. Your beard 

is shaved to the quick. The wind stings your face
and you gasp to find yourself separate 
from the wind; to feel it part and circumvent 
your solid form instead of riding with you 
through empty limbs and dangling leaves of time;
to displace molecules, take up space. 

It is the same and different. Now you know 
some things not transmittable in words; 
you feel the motes of souls buffet your cheeks 
and hear their voices infiltrate every sound. 
Now this becomes your task: to speak for them all.

II 

Jacob Tucker recomposes on the slopes 
of Kennesaw Mountain. A few tourists 
laugh on the trail ahead but have no reason 
to keep watch to rearward, and the ranger 
is sleeping it off in the movie room 

where every quarter hour bugles pledge defeat
to empty chairs or groups of Japanese 
businessmen. Tucker touches his shaven jaw 
and watches a hawk rise from a giant oak. 
He knows the place. Is luckier than most. 
Only the groan of combustion beyond 

the shaven battlefield, only the jet 
intoning like an angel of revenge, 
tell him things have changed. And the silence forced
through the cheesecloth of 130 years. 
Just he and the innermost core of the oak 

remember the twang of death, the howls 
of dying men, the obscene blasts 
of cannons strategically installed (now) 
for kids to climb while parents aim the camera.
His foxhole remains. A shallow leafy dent 

rimmed by haphazard rotted logs labeled 
with explanatory plaque. Tucker 
kneels in the meal of leaves, breathes deep, 
weeps. He died here; but that was not the worst.
The worst was watching, hearing, breathing death 

and living on; discerning the maw of Hell 
in his own bloodthirsty core. Now he recalls, 
almost hears, the tenderest unseaming 
sound—cannon balls parting the leaves— 
and the boy at his side screaming, “Ma!”

III

What if death were not the end of time? 
What if, as you unloose your molecules 
one by one in the ground or in the fire, 
each ticks on in calmest synchrony 
with the orbit of the moon; and you must wait 

to be forgot. You must blow through scritching weeds
on vacant lots, past panes where high school girls
stretch pallid toes into stockings for Prom, 
through scarlet gills of fish and plankton guts 
till you become a cloud approaching low 

across the hills and the farmer looking up 
swipes his chin and smiles to see you come; 
you must pass through forests slated for the ax, 
and pigeon-grimed squares, widows’ marigolds, 
school yards, fair grounds, prison yards, dust. 

Time is slow as you sink in unison 
with billions of trembling things into soil 
and silt, as you spread, widen, and descend 
like manna to the ground. Morning, night, spring,
summer, week, year—and you wait—impatiently 

at first—then at last resigned until 
the instant comes when you find yourself dressed
in a gabardine coat and coarse wool gloves, 
a freshly coifed bun at the nape of your 
neck, walking the teeth of a wintry wind. 

IV 

Rosa Abramowitz has waited 
a mere fifty years because all her folk 
were chunked into a communal hole 
brambled in human limbs from which they rose 
within months—no one left to remember 
another—and were mistook by dumbfounded

saviors at horror’s end for citizens 
come to mourn the dead. But Rosa could not 
rise with the rest because she’d accepted bread 
through barbed wire from a passerby who suffered
a moment’s lapse of self-preservation. 
She told him her name, and was therefore sealed 

to earth by insomniac dreams of one 
dim soul whose courage never rose again 
to such heights, but who found that name lodged fast
in his skull till the day of his demise. 
So Rosa walks alone in an unchanged 

place that was preserved to prevent forgetting 
(although the rending wind has kept us all 
in our beds). She died here. But the worst 
was not death; the worst was standing witness 
to ultimate possibilities—

no Hell left to imagine; Holiness 
no more than a hot cup of tea. She lost 
her faith—the most grievous loss of all— 
on this cindery spot where she was shot 
at roll call for briefly resting her head 

on the shoulder of a friend she’d known 
from childhood. (Hadn’t they racketed round 
her parlor together after Seder 
in search of the Afikoman to redeem 
for peppermints? Or was that, too, mere lie?) 
She died fast. No farewell. Only now, her cry. 

V 

What if the secret to Resurrection is this?: 
You must use your new eyes to weep. You must 
use your lungs to breathe and your mouth to cry
from the dust: O earth, cover not thou my blood. 
No one will hear you. The wind will divide

against your solid form and the atoms 
of all the dead will land on your tongue— 
and you will know who they are. They have names. 
Speak them. They have memories. Cry them. 
Feel the bark of the trees and the cinders 

of the paths. Smell the pollen and the ice 
on the air. Take off your gloves; kneel among 
ashes and leaf meal; feel volition surge 
through your limbs, and blood drive life once more 
into embodiment. Feel. Breath. Hear 

how the lark still sings in the bush afire 
as that old Pol Pot plots, Hutus hack, 
Ceausescu kills, Pinochet cherishes 
slaughter, and the self-satisfied, from afar, 
depress the lever of Devastation. 

See. Bear witness. Open your mouth to hymn 
and to harrow. Eat the world whole. Breathe flame. 
Say, “I am” as the burning bush replies 
“And I AM.” 
                        At last, corporeal, ascend 
in Peace. The rest we can barely envision.