Good Friday

I have been re-reading the Gospel of John, and it's prompting me to wonder some things about Jesus.
He is not adorable. He is not cute or cuddly. He cuts with his words. He shouts. He cries out with a loud voice. He escapes assassins, skirting the crowds and disappearing through stone-carrying mobs. He lives in the wilderness, on the outskirts, and he mocks the people who come to tempt him.
And yet.
He stoops to scribble in the dust for the sake of a shamed woman. He "must needs" go to Jacob's Well to reach a despised people. He weeps to see the grief of a sister bereaved.
I would have wanted to get to know him, and I would have (knowing me) been awfully insecure about it, always checking to see if he still thought I was cool. Would he have? I don't know--there weren't very many people he was close to. Not everyone was a Mary, Martha, Lazarus, John, Peter, James. He was a man--only so much of his personal resources could be outlet to camaraderie with his fellow individuals. Jesus wasn't everyone's Best Friend.
Man of sorrows, acquainted with grief. Not life of the party. Not all the time, at least. He must have been burdened. He must have known where he was heading. He must have been acutely aware of dwindling time, to which all of humanity is bound. (How bizarre, to be forced to accustom yourself to the strictures of linear existence.)
There are only a few places in the gospels where the narrative says that Jesus--Jesus the man--loved someone. I have come to treasure those statements, and those people. The beloved disciple. The siblings from Bethany. The wealthy young man who came running to find eternal life. There are few mentions of this idea of Jesus having human love for a fellow human, and while I am certain it happened far more than the text specifies, the English major in me protests the importance of this textual evidence. "Then Jesus, beholding him, loved him." Did he know? Do you?
It's good Friday. Long ago and far away, Jesus, beholding us, loved us. On Calvary his humanity was stretched past the limit of what any soul could bear. He remained human, suffering his heart to beat til implosion, his lungs to expand til asphyxiation. Acutely aware of time, of biology, of the processes he had himself ordained.
I have to remind myself of these things when I get caught up in the cyclic and linear strictures of human time. I have to keep returning to the Word (made-flesh-and-dwelt-among-us) to recognize who he is, and the once-for-all of that day. I wonder about his blood type, the erythrocyte-leukocyte-plasma cells of innocence. O positive? That would be most appropriate. But who knows. I wonder about those details you only know about someone after having lived with them for a while. I wonder what his myers-briggs personality would have been. I wonder quotidian and ridiculous and patently human things,
And I wonder how, beholding me, he could love me.

This weekend

This weekend I invited friends over to my apartment. Three married couples, one engaged couple, a dating couple, and one half of another dating couple, the woman of which was out of state. And then there was me.
It was funny, and also I wonder when this happened, exactly. My friends are grownups.
I am a grownup?

This weekend I spent an afternoon making a lemon meringue pie and snickerdoodles (from scratch)and another evening altering a sundress I picked up in a thrift store a while back. Baking and sewing. I am a grownup?

o how odd.

Pep Boys

Well.
I've been reading lots of Billy Collins lately.
On the basis of that, here is an apology to anyone who reads this (come to think of it, this also goes out to Billy): the reading is prompting effusions of terrible poetry to come out of me.
more than I've written since--pause for document folder check--last November. None of which I actually posted here, I don't think.
anyway. That's what this blog is for now, a repository for somewhat terrible free verse.

On that note, here's more!
----

Was it inordinately pretentious of me
to sit today in the Pep Boys waiting room,
reading Billy Collins while my oil was being changed?
Wearing aviator sunglasses, and a spring skirt?
I took the sunglasses off when I got inside. Does that
even a little, expiate the bringing of poetry to the auto-shop?
Because there was a quiet rattle of guilt in the back of my mind
like the background noise of the small flickering television
(playing the afternoon soaps and Bonnie Hunt’s talk show)
as I sat and read Nine Horses against the dramatic revelations
(from the soaps) and mechanized clangs and whirs (from the garage).
Yet, too, there was the way in which what I read—
the plainness of the words, the precision of the images—
meshed without a visible seam with the movements of the men behind the half-glass wall, with the up-and-down of two-ton trucks on humming hydraulic hoists.
How I knew the poetry and they knew the cars. How the elements of each were perhaps not so different
From what my initial embarrassment painted them to be.
Yet when the man who took my order poked his head around
and told me that my car was ready, and asked me how my book was,
I couldn’t help sliding it out of sight, and standing up so quickly that I tripped a little,
leaving the waiting room.

Once up, on a Time

Once up on a Time, one must take care to balance well
Times are slippery things.
Once, up on a Time, I tilted oh-so-slightly
and found myself hanging upside-down
where nothing looked as it ought.
Gravity takes everything, even Times
(though they spiral down slow, if "down" is where they go
indeed), no matter where the balance lies.
But even if it's all the same (it isn't)
it's best to be careful. There was once a place,
up on a Time,
where, they say, just so, you could see forever
and not break your neck. Once. Still? I am unsure.
And it's not so easy, you know,
to get back up on a Time
that has once spun by.

it's all fun and games until someone gets hurt

the moon fell tonight
behind the apartment buildings on 81st and Yale,
coasting down smooth at 40 mph,
as I drove down the hill from Harvard.
before the impact that I did not see
it slid behind the tall shadows
that make the hill on Yale higher
maybe, than the moon anticipated.
I thought maybe I'd stop to see
if it would get up again
(it was robust, but looked
a little jaundiced)
but that green arrow steered me imperiously North
and I didn't look back.
If the moon
did not manage to hit the brakes,
if it did not follow my lead, and turn,
I didn't want to see the aftermath:
the lopsided luminous globe bursting on earth
cosmic corpse bleeding
all over those swanky cars and balconies
up at the Vintage,
less devastating than the thought
that it would never race me down the hill again.
Pulling into my own driveway, not a quarter mile from the hill
but less elevated,
I heard no sirens, no disturbances,
leading me to believe that the moon made it okay.
Next time I will take that hill more slowly,
give the moon time
to ease behind the cover of buildings
and crouch there, safe,
until another night.