The Gods Across the River; Transfi guration; Flood Plain; This House, These Grounds

The gods your fathers served across the river
remain forsaken among the tumbled stones.
They gnaw the sacrificial heifer’s bones;
against the wind in rags they crouch and shiver.
But worse than cold and hunger bedevils them.
They feel betrayed. Were they so hard to please?
Did one of all their pantheon condemn
a dalliance with other deities?
Now from among the ruins they see you raise
the temples your new, jealous God desires.
They hear you chant your psalms of servile praise;
they smell the savor of your altar fires.
And yet they know the perversity of your will.
They gather on the river bank, apart,
but sure no single God can long fulfill
the many chambers of the human heart.
They see the sidelong looks your sons and daughters
cast their way across the narrow waters.

Transfiguration

Her father’s painting graced the vestibule.
The passing congregants would pause to gaze
on Jesus in the garden; the Sunday school
was brought to see how one who humbly prays
will gain God’s guiding hand through any trial.
Blue veins embossed the savior’s folded hands,
so real they seemed to pulse, though in a while
that blood would spill upon the arid sands
of Golgotha. The brow the priests decreed
be pierced by cruel thorns, so smooth and white,
immaculate but human, soon to bleed
for others’ sins, seemed bathed in holy light.
She wondered that they failed to recognize
her father’s face, for she had watched him stare
into a glass: his mouth, his nose, his eyes,
the look of resignation and despair
he’d given to the Lord. That holy glow
was attic light by which she watched him limn
the son of God. It was for her to know
that in his image he created Him.
And yet to her the painting was no less
a miracle, and maybe more. She saw
in it how we are blessed by what we bless
and made a part of what we hold in awe.

Flood Plain

Through nineteen years in twenty, winter rains
create a muddy mess, though no disaster.
But when the stars get crossed the river gains
against the grassy levees, rising faster
than men can pile their sandbags rank on rank.
The water gets its way. It finds (or makes)
a breach and cuts its course across the bank
first here, then there, then everywhere. It breaks
the earthen bounds that mankind hold as law,
obscuring borders as the waters rise;
the lines of ownership that people draw
are nothing water deigns to recognize.
They say the earth was cleansed by Noah’s fiood,
the baptized world left laved in a holy glow—
no word of bloated corpses mired in mud,
a stench you’d think had wafted from below
the devil’s privy, of splintered wreckage scattered
horizon-wide, of wedding portraits, clothes,
and bedding spewed through ruptured walls, bespattered
with filth and cackled at by gulls and crows.
Wiser heads who’ve seen a village drowned
know not to build along the riverside.
They seek the hills, but find that any ground
too high to fiood is high enough to slide.

This House, These Grounds

This house: the inside walls still bearing squares
of whiter white where photographs were tacked,
a missing step that makes the basement stairs
perilous, the landing window cracked,
the kitchen counter scorchmarked where it shows
that something hot was dropped, the bedroom doors
so warped that some won’t open, some won’t close,
and everywhere, walked thin, the softwood fioors.
These grounds: the garden pathway overgrown,
the sagging gate, the pump arthritic with rust,
the orchard (apples, pears, and peaches) blown
into ungainly tangles with every gust,
and in the shed a tractor, stripped, its frame
the bruised red of wounds that never healed;
manure spreader, mower, and plough the same,
at intervals across the unmowed field.
If parting words were spoken, none remain;
a backward glance and then a shrug instead.
And yet an hour’s looking makes it plain
that nothing ever really goes unsaid.

RICHARD WAKEFIELD teaches writing and American Literature at the University of Washington-Tacoma, Evergreen State College, and Tacoma Community College.