January 27th: Wash Everything Even the Stained
Glass
The Ruin was
within
Oh cunning
Wreck
that told no
Tale
and Let no
Witness in
Emily Dickinson
After they beat you and left you
to your clichéd death and dying
after the handyman boy found you
nude and nearing the blue hue
of a saint in stained glass (that’s
what I thought of when I saw you)
you know the one I’m talking
about dull on the ground floor
that takes all the mud and grass
and is impossible to see in the winter
and forgotten when the benevolent
window washer comes every start
of summer and begins at the most
wounded piece of glass and how he
wicks out like water on cloth like cotton
stilled in the solid wax muffled
a hand over lips and throat only
a fire will let out I have to say
when they told me they found you
that way and a few stray teeth
I came to dwell alone in remember:
sponges. the ones I watched
the window man dunk and pull up
running water like hair over a bolster
(through to the window, see where
I’m standing?) and bubbles were
your mouth closing almost for good
and I wanted to see from the inside
so I slipped off a while and blessed
myself with the cold holy water in the font
and I walked down to the pew
and kneeled and he was through
with one small lily and stroked up
to the next frame into Judas and who
would blame him his kiss if that’s
what he was supposed to do with his mute
lips on the warm bony skin under
the Savior’s eye--or maybe it wasn’t
Judas at all I saw in that story in glass
maybe it was this time a nobody a
nobody like me was washing the body
and going into the basement…
listen: from the inside you are ribs
and glass shattered on the trauma room
floor. You are un-put-back-able. Even
with my own bucket of water and soft
as you can get soap, this far down
is too far gone. But I don’t stop there’s no
daylight there’s only me and in-
spiration and twelve tiny windows
in a room I’ve never seen from the inside
ever. To distract myself I ask who
framed each of these and only let them
peak just up out of the grass enough
to be colorful to bugs and wasps and winter
ice? Each crack my sponge catches
makes a soft sigh and pulls and so I use
my hands alone and water and wipe
like a Veronica or a Mary or a daughter
in shock each piece of glass loose teeth
each color a different kicked bruise
each leaded embedding a stitch in your lip
your swollen shut eye your (though not
for days) broken through spleen
and the breathing a bigger lung a rib went
into and through. You are Jesus walking
Jesus kissed Jesus teased and tried Jesus
stripped Jesus flogged Jesus walked Jesus
falling Jesus getting up Jesus lifted nailed
forgiving dead you are Jesus being
washed like windows like glass you are
in the hands of ghosts who want to save
each piece of dignity buried in your skin
because it is precious more precious
after stones lay still on basement floors
of your skin red and blue so red and blue
you are a new hue you are a new you
even you wouldn’t know lying beaten
on a hospital bed.
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