Redeemer

I am fifty years old.  The surface is worn; the skin draped heavily on bones belies the pedagogy of some sculptor less subtle, less delicate and working in a medium far less permanent then marble.  This reminds me...

The sandstone gallery in my father's rock garden, once recognizably made of limbs and faces, have become in the intervening years just bumps and hollows, neurotic and modern.  This might be a family, a collection of soldiers, a tangled armistice of lovers.  The water landing from the long arch o the garden hose is like sweat.  It pools and erodes.  It takes away...

Once someone said while laying naked next to me:  "Every time I make the sex ('with you,' he does not say.), I wonder if I have lost something, some irreplaceable something, expended the essence of my being, and somehow spat past the plaster-of-paris cast of me ('that you have broken,' he does say.) and hit me squarely in the temple."  Art Class.  This spit is/was the corrosive that has slowly melted the mortar of my soul.  There is a constant muttering.  This prayer...

And the redeemer stands there--imperious, obstinate, precarious--with fixed stare, boring a gorgeous hole into more than a million souls, believers impatient to be judged.  We are as prepared as we will ever be, wearing our alibis and our excuses in boy scout fashion:  each merit badge, bedazzled, carefully hand-sewn onto the sash.  All the time and distance, all the busses crammed with curiosity, tourists yearning (to be wet, to be dead, to be dancing) despite his stoney gaze, keeps hurdling  toward the spot on our horizon that will haunt us.  Forever...

and ever.

Amen.