Seven Sketches of Christ

by Eli
  • March 13, 2011
  • Poetry
  • Narrative

steps of the temple

Spoiler! :
doves that waver
like pilot lights -- latched cages,
the steps to the temple smooth
as hands washing feet.
a handful of coos, soft as a room full
of the soft cello churn of silkworms.
shekels counted,
ringing with new sight.

the carpenter's son with
a cat of nine tails, hand-knotted
tables spilling over, shouldered like
milkcows, coins flung to the same
prattling of salmon scales
beneath clear, high-voiced rivers.
bent olive tree, vesuvius of doves,
and the scalded magma of
robes fled across stone.

he is a little out of
breath, sweats, is startled by
the hard, stoppered leather
croak of his whip through the air,
how his hands shake, heart
thunders like an ambush.


down from the cross

Spoiler! :
temples broken
like a second language,
rubbled syllable
of stone.

red mill of sky, cracking
open like cowboy souls
before told flames in blackfoot
hills. you take him down,
he uncouples, carpals and tarsals sliding off nails
the way the dull peach
of a heartbeat slides off
of run steel.

you fold him up, he is light
as waist-high grass. lightning
on the horizon like the broken
legs of gulley horses, lanterns
through rain, and the little
glassed-in petal flames decimated
like newness in a wet spring.

three crosses, a crown
rutted and brambly as an
old farm road. your faces are
full of bones tonight, you
arrange his arm, his hand
cupping something
against tremors, waves, doubts.


legion

Spoiler! :
borealis of bone
wrinkles through passes of skin—
these white roads sinking
gradually as coffins
through the red worked
clay of flesh.

he carries his boy in his arms, the
almond trees radio with a small panama
of blossoms, christ in the streets, white
robe spilling as bone through skin. can
you help him—pink, flung froth
at the corner of his mouth where he
began to bite his tongue.

fiddled bones, hands cramping
like utah canyons—crawls with it
as the walls of an old house.
a figure on a porchstep, the smell
of lightning in pastures where
you are the tallest thing—old
babylonian identity, you plunge
blackly as an arabian breed.

legion flares
to blossoms. the boy's back
arches like electricity.



pigs from a cliff
like sheer, pink silk
dopplering from a shoulder.


gardening

Spoiler! :
rolled stone, taken
body, ladyship of blossoms
in the garden, droop-headed
as gazelles at water. burial
clothes folded like people
against bad news, in the stone
trim of the afternoon.

her pulse rippling
like a summer moth, sinks
into the rags of three days
before, lilies splitting
open like temples in crisis.
the tomb of joseph of
aramathea filled with bodilessness
like the sight of seeing
a farmer without a thumb.

the gardener, and
dark woman, bent with the
heavy sunniness of pottery—he touches
her on the shoulder, her eyes
rising to his, not recognizing at first
all the stones rolled away
like lake waves.


light

Spoiler! :
how light scrapes
across skin, like wildfires
against wide spaces—i shrink,
reptilian as an ancestor to birds.
raptor, bones hanging down,
blood found in dirt
like obsidian tools.

lifting the blanket
in the leprosarium, i fall apart
immediately, he stands in organized
stone, and the smell of my
rot rises to him, like
a long-drawered love-letter
and he breathes deeply, the way a man
may get used to the smell of cows
working in pastures and
hot stalls.

i am not made for this—
the steps to the pool curve inward,
ripples hooking like beestings,
his hand outstretched, or
pointing away (gather your bed)? something in the way
the sunstroke of columns rise,
and the water rattles with
reflections, like the mind
of a painter.

the sun is hot, there is
the smell of hay, white muslin
in a market-scene.


footstools

Spoiler! :
a woman hunched over an
alabaster jar of perfume, oils. she is still
glistening with kisses like dew
on wool packed in april, straining
with bones worn down by spurs,
notched like market smiles.
she kneels, bends whole
channels to him.

how beautiful upon the mountains
his dusty feet, leather straps
creaking undone like a fondly-told
story. she does not look up, he looks
down at the oily scry of her hair,
blueblack as the lanternless return of husbands,
hair that brushes the tops of his feet,
painting blood there.

the smell of perfume and returned
tears. her lips hot on the small,
diverse bones—she is surprised
at all the bone, huts of it, pavilions
of it which the skin droops from
like settled birds.

yellow dugouts of callouses,
arches and bridges, the architecture of
the first, rambling step—
her dim blood, papery in its glow
as a woman's voice after childbirth

he lets her, and
closes his eyes
sits back.


sermons

Spoiler! :
sermons of rust, dead seas
god-wide as a house-fire—
westsouthwest of galilee
where violets weep downhill,
waving like handkerchiefs
at a pier, cold as unsunned
blood.

places to sit and crane a neck, whether
in dry, locust-boned pastures, and their
wire fences as a barbed, throttled equator, shuddering
through the brush like a safari of blood—mounts
where olive trees squat and twist
like a shepherd's yet-wed daughters.

five thousand at his feet,
he washes over them like a creek
over the kept souls of its drowned boys.
clouds forming sects over allegories
of typical things—salts of the earth,
turned cheeks, inheritors of kingdoms.

near capernaum, or in prayers
spoken as quietly as to
sick horses. wind from the sea—
ground-flowers swell
like wagon-ruts after rain,
they all waver as if on the edge of
something high.

Comments & reviews · 2
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User avatar
Sageleaf
Review
Sageleaf wrote a review · Sun May 01, 2011 5:29 pm

Wow Eli, this is powerful! It makes you think about those stories in a different way, more in depth. I have to disagree with Kamas, though; I like how you add things to the picture. Although I do agree that you could include a little more substance. I love your idea! My favorite is "Gardening".

Keep writing!

Sage

User avatar
Kamas
Review
Kamas wrote a review · Tue Mar 15, 2011 10:12 pm

Hi Eli, nice to see a new face.
I'm sorry I didn't get to this last night.
I'm not going to look at each individual poem and going to keep it short, because to be honest, I
a. am lazy
b. like to look at the big picture.
c. only see this having one big issue that's far more important then the nitpicky stuff.

I'm unfamiliar with your work, because I tend to stalk around before pouncing. But here we go.

What I see here is a sturdy piece of work that's being drowned by an overdependance on relative imagery
that by the end of the poem, is completely meaningless. It's like making everything complex, but not needing too because all it does it weighs down your poem.

For example

as a room full
of the soft cello churn of silkworms.


It's a really good piece of imagery, but by the end stand meaningless in the poem.

You english majors are pleasant to read, but at the end, I stand beaten down by imagery and concepts and loose strings and don't have much emotion to account for.
You want to communicate your story, which you do, with a lot of excess fluff, that the read tends to spit out in the process as you feed the poem to them, but at the end, I've just been told a story, absolutely no emotional investment in it though.

The fluff has to do with it, through stretching out and layering the concept your poem emcompasses, you lose the essence of the story.
There's a line, it's not fine, because you can play with it, it is flexible. But once you've tipped over the line, on the side of overdependance on description and literary devices (or equally on the side of barren and blunt poetry) It's rather difficult to find that balance so that your poetry becomes a vessel for the story, containing something of value your reader can absorb to actually feel something for it.

All in all your technical is down pat. And we can see it. But don't feed me a load feathers for the sake of feeding me a load of feathers.
Make it a little more delicate. We'll chat about this.

Kamas



Maybe our favorite quotations say more about us than about the stories and people we're quoting.
— John Green