everyday runofthemill wonders

everyday runofthemill wonders

it happens though you don’t know

it the growth below the skin and in the nailbed

and then best of luck proving

(though over time but only over

time as though time were some

hibernating thing and spring is still

some ways off having taken

six or eight wrong turns these

past couple of weeks) people want

now now now evidence they ache

to probe up to their third knuckle bone

and then with more than one

finger and maybe the latent sadist

in them wakes when the holes open

like night mouths how a thin film

dried and pearly in the right light

flakes to the floor and stays there

even though it’s just as holy a relic

(listen it’s His skin!) as his honey

(painters today) hair.

I read somewhere some medieval

cult claimed to have the circum-

sized foreskin of Jesus and people would

pay to venerate this rejected flap of flesh

(and why not, they who made this man

a eunuch) REALLY? They’d scrape

their knees at the alter and some attendant

would salt their heads with river or sea

or if no water dinner oil and the bent

would not refuse.  It’s just gone

to prove how desperate they are to see

how easily they can be taken can be perswaded

can be parted with the coin they’ve labored

all day weeks maybe, and this time

turn to the relics instead and heft

their eyes to the velvet lined casket

and believe

what’s beneath the lid.  Believe

it more than their on nail bed

the nerves and vessels and cells the causeway

of the fingers themselves, how they can be

made to make straight lines, circles,

rectangles, bird’s eyes, a bridge, people and steeple

all this and not the least: the bravery

of laying down a sword before some schmuck

(your call, remember?  it happened in the garden

before the arrest, remember?) loses his ear

and screams

and bleeds

and before Jesus

is bound his last hands-on miracle is to restore

it all

brand new like it was nothing

like it was there all along,

like all he had to do was move the poor boy’s hair away

from his face and neck and say

TADA!

Doubt it if you want.  Limit it.  Be deaf

spent and blind, it doesn’t matter.  It

happens without you

paying attention.  It does.  Miracles like these

don’t need a bullhorn or a kiss

on the cheek or an eye on a positron scanner.

They don't need a hand up to the wrist in the open

slightly oozing sword wound--none of that.

But tell me, when you pull out

explain to me why your fingers

tingle like you’d wrapped  them in elastic

and watched them

go cold turn blue as that rooster, you know the one

the rare kind, the one that crows

when men say ‘not me’, ‘not me’.