More on: Easter

Easter, I make myself space 
in a pew facing a pillar  
four feet wide, I’d say, gray,  
mottled, plastered countenance.

Can we stay awake this time? Can we keep the world from ending, not by flood or fire but by its own human hand?

A purple kite against the wall with the wind still in it. Above the side altars with the brass candelabras and unlit candles, purple ghosts. Purple ghosts behind the votive trays in the vestibule, too. Only the sacristans collecting for burning the excess palms are left uncovered, for now. Here stood the Little Flower; here,…

Gethsemane’s sleepers, be with me If I sleep. Hypnopomps to the cock’s crow, To the olive grove’s Dawnshadows’ undergnarl. Skull-place, tricrossed, two-thieved hill, Over- Hang me if I wake.   † The bed-world Is the total part, Unrememberable mnemonics Muttered through the dream (Now I lay me, Tarry here awhile— Now I lay me Down—tarry…

“Who will roll away the stone?” What is “To be or not to be” compared to that question? Or Pilate’s “What is truth”? Even Jesus’s own “Whom do men say that I am”? Who will roll away the stone, the weight that looms in the way, not of resurrection— the women had no hope of…