I’ll get back to the psychology of “feelings” soon. In the meantime, here is an Easter interlude.
When the Trade Center Towers came down in 2001, I was living in Konstanz, Germany. I was up at the lab at Uni Konstanz. A sunny afternoon, and I was checking the New York Times site like I did most afternoons. There it was: a breaking story of a plane that had accidentally collided with one of the towers. I remember it as just a headline, but after a refresh there was a photo with a hole and smoke. Then the site slowed to a crawl, and apprehension set in, followed by the reveal of a photo showing that the second tower had been hit. That’s when I left the lab and rode my bike back home to be with my then wife and my daughters. There we huddled to watch the news on the television. The images of falling bodies. The gaping holes vomiting smoke. Another sudden jet crashing into the Pentagon in D.C., a scramble of reports about additional attacks, additional planes, firefighters rushing up stairwells, and the scrambling of military jets. And then, one after another, the two towers fell.
As much as I remember the vulnerability, shock, and fear for my young daughters, what I also remember is the immediate solidarity in the days that followed of ordinary strangers. German colleagues and students who checked in on me and my family. The city-wide moment of silence. The flowers left at embassies. The candle-light vigils. The tolling of bells.
Over the years, Easter for me has come to signify an acknowledgment of sacrifice in the service of healing and renewal. It’s the doctors, nurses and healthcare workers who have thrown themselves into the breach of the COVID-19 pandemic. The parents and grandparents who cared for us when we were children, washing our clothes, wiping our noses, and massaging tightened calves in the middle of the night. Friends who have helped in moves. The ordinary workers in Konstanz, Germany who took a moment to stand quietly at noon in solidarity with those hurt and killed an ocean away in the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Easter celebrates these behaviors: small, often betrayed, but load bearing. This after all was the soil of Christ’s ministry: the peacemakers, the persecuted outcasts, the mourners, the ordinary. And the lesson of Easter is that despite the mocking humiliations of the powerful — the taunts of “Freedom Fries” and “Old Europe” or the resistance to covering the medical bills of first responders — despite these attempts to silence and punish and deaden, the spring soil will continue to answer the sun’s call.
This particular poem I wrote as a sort of Easter mosaic, and it is dedicated to a couple, Juan and Ute Delius, who showed my family tremendous kindness when we lived in Germany.
Lazarus
(For Juan and Ute)
1.
Draw thread through skin
numb &
engraved in winter.
The grief-sung vertebrae
of wind
chimes at night,
the
ululations of church bells
over field and
orchard — once
pear, plum,
wheat and apple.
Come, then, senescence and hum
your metal.
That sing-song
gestern caught gaunt and callow
like moths
circling the harbinger of heaven,
like
constellations sirened numbly forward —
a music of
nets in which the dolphins thrash
when the lines
are drawn in, anchored, and pulled tight.
2.
This heft of enwrapped waters,
draw upon
convenient draw,
caught trumpet
of consciousness
liquored like a
dog at its wounds
or the way
the white wake
of a plane,
far above,
silently streams,
spreads and splays.
A depth that contains the
scattered flurry of vision,
arranged like
pastels haphazard in the box.
The cargo of a former life carried
elsewhere,
memories resting
like water in the pitted roads
where birth
gives way to the night-time swarms,
the jazz of corruption
begat from reflected heaven’s breeding.
3.
Each moment tapped,
pregnant and
fitted,
as if laying
stone
to make a
road.
So many eyes staring
like a
peacock’s bloom,
an exchange of
wild flowers for a
a sunset
spread red as wine
Produce
in the church square
Potatoes Carrots and Apples
Kilo weights, raw and cold
Flesh from the butcher
sliced and
jointed, jointed and drawn.
4.
Too sweet for some,
Like a custard’s breath –
hard in learning,
awkward in fact.
Unbecoming’s active pursuit
like a pole to the shadow
cast —
an anchored
still to the sun’s pass,
that cloth
that wipes over and over.
Over the ever-opportune
weeds that burst,
yes, burst
forth into their calling –
a pack of
girls keen to see
upon whom the
glance will fall.
5.
Yes, with bracken
grows
nettle. Wrappers
and peels.
The plastic cups.
Gravy,
puddings, ketchup.
Cars and trucks,
and cars and
trucks,
and trucks
and trucks.
24 7, death she moans this rush,
planted heavily
and sucking breath,
while the three
ladies, their buttocks sway
the gospel of
fate, a necessity bellowed out,
rough ropes in
hand, with each pull and release –
thus, they
frog-grunt their imprints of industry.
6.
Tongue-tasted,
coins swallowed
and the
candle lit.
Night ember, social safe
and tucked in
bed.
Now cargoed
purpose sleeps,
The tethered morning chorus
guarded and
groomed, mulched and clipped.
String of fate and string of
rescue, spooled
and strung to
where the delivery trucks come,
to where the
workers call at the dock —
those many
voices of dying, calling and calling
in their
approach to the maze’s bloated point.
7.
This,
night’s new year.
A cast of sparks —
And then, percussive born.
And the bells beat.
And the bells beat
more flares of
midnight
crackling out light
Roosted buildings, cobbled street.
Hollowed. Inverted.
Explosive
moments.
Distant reports
For a city that wrestles drunkenly
forth
in answer to
the fireworks from across the water.
8.
Red among
yellow.
Red among
green.
Sailboats laid
upon the lake
hot air
balloons above
the distant
mountains
roaring fire and
straining at ascent.
How loss becomes heartbeat
swaddled in such
feminine hands.
How familiar dawn, stray thread
comes
with the
strangled raucous of crows,
hop-hopping,
and lifted up
into the trees
that buckle the graveyard’s fence.
Your eyes have been pocketed
across an ocean of desire
bilk and seepage with the
risen. Again, Lazarus, rise.
9.
Rise frogs of spring.
Each season a thought —
patterned Nature’s pull.
Rise gravestones.
Rise stars.
Constellations of dirt,
mausoleums of
heaven,
risen ferment and fallen flame.
Rise the ants to work their mounds.
Rise the teller to auger her grounds.
Rise the children on their ways to
school,
Lent back and hand-less, coasting bikes
before the rain that will spackle
the lake.
Shutters shut. Eyes
open. Rise Lazarus. Rise.