Embedded Files
Untold stories of the cross
What are they? Endless and haunting,
even to relate just one, the dreadful tale
once shared by a friend. When entering
the lobby of a small municipal airport
he saw the ticket agent holding a severed
arm, a man pressing towels to the stump
of his wife’s shoulder to slow the scarlet flow,
the body sliced while walking past the blade
of a single-prop plane, the limp wing
of that arm beyond all repair and nothing
left to do but nail it to an ancient timber,
the horizontal beam that stretched left
and right to embrace all pain, the agony of
the woman’s muted cry scaling the vertical
beam skyward to echo a desperate prayer.
When the Nazarene hung from a tree,
moaning my God, my God, did his cry also
embrace this moment of irretrievable loss?
Or the lily of a young girl’s body crushed
by incest? Or a starving Jew at Dachau
snarled in the camp’s barbed wire, as if
in a crown of thorns? Did he place in
every eye the scars of a wounded god?
What mortal rest is there but to wrap each
broken body in a hymn of soft muslin
when the evening sun streaks its quotidian
shroud with blood for the great unwept?
originally published in Irreantum
a theory of language in the shadow of a sundial
Consider the privilege of Delicate Arch opening to an ocean
of blue sky, begging a touch of the hand. A fabric of space
so rich it invites every pilgrim past its flaming stone gate
to the presence of God. Consider the presence of God,
not that deep, shimmering blue that appears infinite
and eternal, nor the single cloud that lords overhead
with such regal grace and detachment. Rather, consider
how the Presence might feel oddly, strangely, human.
My wife’s smile begs a touch of the hand. What better clock
to frame her smile than the carved face of time in an arch
of ancient stone—ageless, inscrutable—celebrating
the present hour like the curve of a rainbow. Consider
how the shadow of the arch ticks away in slow circles,
absorbing the day’s vernacular in the rainbow it imitates.
A sundial. A clock voicing time in wordless language.
Time as a shadow of everything that passes and language
as a shadow of what mind and heart conceive in time.
The sundial’s circling shadow, as keeper of time, never
fully fades, though it deepens and darkens with nightfall,
just any language will eventually surrender to nightfall.
Poets lament no word they write will ever last, but sink
instead into oblivion. Yet the Nazarene declared nothing
lost, every word remembered to require a reckoning.
Ephemeral? Eternal? What do outcomes of language
prove except in final judgment? Something to consider
with the smile and touch of a lover’s hand, speaking yet
another language celebrating silence when two live
together as one, both wounded and potentially godlike.
a flower speaks the impossible
For with God nothing shall be impossible
~ Luke 1:37 ~
If we circle off this world
and call it the Open Wound of God,
its laws will be simple and few.
What is not quixotic will die.
The impossible will often prove true
as brute reality unravels in every dream.
Here, a man and a woman will equal
whatever haven their gestures suggest,
whatever heaven their words create.
A flower the man offers the woman
will look like a handful of snow
cut from a bed of white peonies.
It’s a simple gesture. He yields
to the flower his unspoken words,
has faith it will speak their intimacies,
soften past regret, tell the woman,
With this we heal. A daughter of Eve,
the woman takes some convincing,
requires touch, taste, to know
her certainties. I hear nothing,
she says. The flower is a riddle of silence.
Exactly, he replies, the very figure
of a man. Infinite possibility takes root
when language flowers from a flower.
The peony spreads solace
over them to drape the wounds
of their world in white lace. Listen,
just listen, the man thinks. Imagine
that altar cloth, its impossible words.
With words, impossible words, we heal.
originally published in Irreantum
Douglas Talley has BFA and MFA degrees in creative writing and a JD degree. After receiving his BFA, he worked in Italy for two years offering volunteer church service. As a lawyer, he has advocated various environmental and social justice causes, including the recovery of Jewish assets confiscated by Nazis during World War II. Presently, he leads a writers’ workshop for inmates in a women’s prison. His poems and essays have appeared in various journals, and his collection of poems, titled Adam’s Dream, was released by Parables Publishing.
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