PARTIAL GLIMPSES OF THE FACE OF JESUS



The hand pulled back from water is always partially
                gloved
        with water (as the soul

must be, gazing through a river’s staggered
                brilliance,
        cloudwork lighting the weave

of trout)—something a stiff wind
                could
        evaporate, or fingers leak back to the river.

The same river moving now, undulant,
                before me.
        Spirit infusing spirit along a rip

in gravity.  Current in it like a corkscrew.
                Silt riding high
        on the rain’s torque,

then tiring in a long, dull, nutrient curtain.
                Rev-
        elation swifter there for certain fish;

sunlight glossing even the spray of stones.
                How could I
        ever hope to contain such radiance,

another angling next to mine, touching
                mine,
        inside me like a coiling liquid,

a slur in the heart or blood
                carried
        as uneasily as word carries matter?

I know the flicker’s cry now—two short bursts
                of repeatable
        longing—and where

the woodpecker nests, its song inside,
               then
        outside of the tree.  A starling on a dead

limb, hovering as I hover—wanting
                to steal
        its home.  Our attention—

the something beautiful given.  As the cranes
                are,
        or the pepper-black gathering

of clouds.  My driving parallel to the sunset
for awhile
in a blood-orange light—

radio playing—then cutting along
                a backroad—
        belief so rife in the fields

and yards, the cattle lie down around it,
                horses
        shuttle in the wind,

galloping right up to the edge of wire.
                And a creek
        there too, flattened backwater,

blister of scum and weeds.
                I took
        two photographs near this place once

and stacked them into a single shot,
                a deer’s
        carcass up close matching the contour

of the creek so that it was a single body
                of water,
        something in the pliant ribs

mirrored exactly in the pattern
                of swaying
        reeds.  As if the animal

had paused in that last terrible
                in-rush
        of breath and held it there until

the truck passed and the water stilled,
                and its eyes
        drained of color.  And then,

of course, the daylight whistling,
                its long
        spears marring the chamois.  Torso

and water, my own body and water.
                The smell
        of the deer like a garment

thrown down from the afterlife . . .  Somewhere
                in the tall
        grass, a golden bird.  Mules,

in a shaded grove, as magnificent as
                palominos;
        a heron, I thought,

drinking from their pool, two dimensional
                at first
        in the water’s glazed

aspect, then suddenly alert to presence—
                full-bloomed,
        wide-winged.  Two deer later

staring back at me from their side of this trespass.