The Procurator crept behind his throne…
(to shift some sulphurous gas
that ached at his distended gut.)
Cautious, as he'd recently become,
of failing Jewish laws of tribal civility.
Feigned looking over shuffled parchments
(and thought:
fucking leeches, crawling up my thigh...)
Paused - then pained,
he held his sun-burnt brow,
as if the bones of contemplation
still survived there.
The yak-jawed old man, rigid with propriety,
observed him -
patient as a boulder in a stream awaits erosion
- particle by particle.
Though Pilate knew,
several more like him could brook a dam...
just a few...
malicious and with rent cloth,
wailing their infectious foreign squall,
might forge the local Tiber into flood.
Big enough, they were, as boulders go.
He begged a nebulous spirit for escape,
to be gone, or simply rid of this -
saved or eviscerated -
he didn’t care,
so long as under Grace's long-flapped cloak.
He thought of an old invocation once heard -
(ranted one night by a gumless woman, who
fending off the amorous blows of his companions,
wailed it to an empty sky)
tried to coil his rigid tongue close to the sound,
but had the words wrong.
A voice skimmed past his shoulder;
glanced up into his ear - a tap,
as from a hand
made up of old breath:
- Now?
- No - I'm still... thinking
(Wait... Ah...)
And thanked the Gods
the priests still burn their incense.
- Now
he muttered.
(When old and excommunicated to Gaul,
as he will be,
and sifting past his arthritis for a cause,
a sack of old-ripe bitterness for comfort,
this moment won't even be recalled.
As it should not.
A separate pile of latter-youth, tagged:
Bureaucratic haemorrhoids will sit,
unobserved.)
A rat-faced, gaunt, but designated King, entered.
And as he stood there,
bare feet on the stones...
(that took a family three years just to carve,
polish, and deliver to the man
who held their desert field by force of numbers
(place one spear buried inches from the next,
head into ground and shaft poked up to clouds,
until the field groans from
the hundred thousand pointed plough that tills it,
and each spear’s home a different country yet -
and from the clouds,
looking like the fashioned pixels
on an old sepia-tone photograph
describing Empire)
those sorts of numbers,
and that sort of wearing omniscience)
...he thought:
- after me, and after this, all others in my place will wonder
why I did not defecate from fear -
believing myself foolish and humiliated -
for being caught, or being listened to.
Why my knee’s strength did not shudder, and cave in,
my mud-grimed chiton stained as a white-washed doorway
used by drunks each night to off-load piss on,
and begged my life returned to anonymity.
They will think: no, it could not happen.
Though perhaps.
And believing their cause just, they’ll say:
I must be as he was.
Or others
will substitute
my lacking.
Righteousness for excrement.
Arrogance for self-loathing.
Contempt for passivity and fear.
(Add two millennia and a concrete room:
a flock of electrons dance amongst themselves;
until, tired out or bored, they choose direction,
or have one chosen,
and shoot together off along a wire
seeking someplace warm.
Weee! Like a roller coaster.)
Branches, spiked, but young,
are coiled around a Greek’s thick arm,
then fastened, end over end,
into a crown...of sorts.
- Fuck it, I’m stinking from this foreign heat,
he spits towards his underling,
and thinks of those cool Macedon thighs at home
(a boy who tagged along one march,
and cooks the evening meal).
- Ow, you cunt - draws blood around
his regiment’s tattoo, and reckons:
a splash of colour, good, won’t hurt it much.
Looks around.
- Where was I...?
The Rabbi felt unfitting in his clothes;
his forehead split in two by a migraine -
before such things were.
Knew the words of invocation, but refused.
He walked solitary through the cobbled yard
to where his ancient doorway stood;
passed under the dark gentle curve of shade...
until his skin goose-bumped
and shivered from the chill.
Stepped out of his garments, one by one,
his naked uniformity of softness
exposed to ignorant mortar.
And then,
like an elephant on the plains of Sarengeti
with an old familiar tree,
raked his back against the rough white wall
behind him,
chanting a familiar song,
lifting and falling with his knees,
until his back and arse
were raw and ribboned.
Then turned over for his chest, his cheek, his stomach;
so that a section of the room was painted
by his despondence.
His wife, returned, with items from the stall,
hobbled with her burden through the kitchen,
tripped over bundled trousers on the floor,
and sent the recently purchased chicken
- featherless -
flying through the air,
until it crumpled in a corner
in a posture of resigned misery.
(She thought: Now he’s really in trouble...)
* * *
Perspective beckons,
meets over at an unseen point
- just a bit -
- a little -
- forward -
as expectation,
opaque and untenable as future.
Though some knew otherwise;
and looked over their shoulders -
knowing they could not, should not see it clearly.
Only the past in front . .
where you might stain it
like pissing into wind.
* * *
Grace watches, knowing:
not at the end, but sometime close before,
I’ll emerge.
(He gobs immortal spittle into sand -
where trees will grow)
I’m called, I come.
So it is what it is.
I have some purpose after all...
I mean...
any low-life shit-head can ask. - please
the holler goes
and sounds familiar as the last word left
from a vocabulary. (A switch fires on the old gates of a cell,
the bolt catches, scrapes along the mechanism,
and a single voice of unrelenting nil,
announces:
“time.”
Two eyes that have stared
at the grain of a wall
for hours,
stay fixed.
Note marks along the brick-work.
Close.
Exhales.)
A crowd, wearied by heat,
though not yet by spectacle,
lines the roadside.
A tirade of gossip and posturing reverence,
of courtship rituals acted in disguise.
And one old woman, standing at the back,
shrunken by her years -
though not her curiosity -
shoves those in front:
-Let me...!
Like a pit-bull.
-I can’t see, let me...
Wrenches two apart, and peals her ragged head
through the opening.
Easier to be born, here, than get a view.
A week ago,
old wood, thick with age,
counted its descent
by bark stripped off and burnt for kindling,
its shaping with rough blades, dented
from other use,
with chrystalised rust running along their length.
Then clamped and stretched
by hands unused to gentle,
until its planted elsewhere on a hill;
a branch pinned to its trunk -
the height and angle measured
by a strange efficacy.
And today,
it wonders why they took such effort.
copyright, © 1997, 2007 Moby Pomerance |
