Vicarious

View PDF

Say heavenly powers, where shall we find such love? 
—Paradise Lost, Book III.1.213 

For and in behalf of those dead 
before God’s love could smother 
them. I enter the font and take a baptism. 
Buried in the temple’s basement, twelve 
garlanded oxen balance the precarious 

pool on their broad stone backs. 
The water feels progressively warmer 
as I’m dunked again and again— 
now for an 18^th century Frenchman, 
who may have been tall, gregarious 

and proud. Or not. Who knows? He 
is only a name mangled 
in baptizer’s mouth tied 
indelibly to a spirit one step 
nearer salvation. They harry us, 

the dead, sharing our beds 
at night and wearing our clothes 
by day, driving us ever 
to find them, save. And we, 
we are devout Mormons curious 

to discover ancestors and release 
them from ignorance. We feel 
for them that vague, indifferent 
concern born of personal non 
acquaintance. Call it caritas— 

a love effortless and light as afternoon. 
The love, say, of Jesus on the trail 
when he dropped the wooden beam 
in the dirt (never mind that we 
weren’t there) and stooped to carry us.