Forty Days - Part 2

Those days before we grew half-used
to breathing air suffused
with presences to tend our want;
the days when we had only thought him ...
thought him only a more imperious Rabbi,
Rabbi, who had entered
to expiate the sin of Abel;
imperious Prophet, who had quenched
the fire on the bloody Altar;
Prophet, who dared to have entered the Holy of Holies
seeking the Key of Knowledge hidden there
by them who go not in themselves
and open not to them who would go in —
searching for his Kingdom's Key
the Key to his Kingdom
to which he is Doorway and Door
and when he had found it, had given it Peter.
Hid Elohim, till the Secret
gushing from Peter's mouth
made our tongues prick
and the nape of my neck
tingle, as with sprinkled water.
Elohim, before the Dove descended
bearing in her beak a twig
dripping from the tree of life
fluttering above him,
dropping the sap on him
making him christ
with the living chrism;
who, while moist from the river bathing,
yet thirsted for despair;
and said to them who grew weak with their fastings:
— " Not one of you hungers.
You weaken me with your weakness
who listen only with the inward ear
and miss me seeing with one eye.
It is for the hungry I hunger.
I have found others filled and drunken
and now I find you emptied of all thirst.
Fast not; and eat of every herb
but of that herb bitter in itself
eat not —
Your hands, then, will not reach
to the middle of the world
nor your gods, then, forsake you. "

In the sarcastic stillness of catastrophe
shame numbed us.
I sat all day with no food
turning with blueing, unrecording eyes
his scroll of Enoch
thinking him sinless, if folly be not sin .

*****

The news of his rising at first seemed natural;
(like daybreak after the gray doubt)
and much less lonely so.
We woke to live when his brother came,
James the austere, the just,
told, ran and told;
came running to say:
that the Lord no sooner had given his grave-cloth
to Malchus in the High Priest's House
that the Lord was before James where he lodged,
asking for a table and bread —
took the bread, brake, and commanded:

— " Eat, brother; forget to fast
and in forgetting, forget them who hunger.
Know what you are doing, and be saved;
know not, and be with all who go against my Law.
But knowing or unknowing
take my bread and eat —
a sleeper wakens with me, from among the sleepers. "
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