In the painting by Duccio,
Jesus rides into Jerusalem.
The disciples crowd behind him,
each with his own gold plate
for a halo.

The crowds gesture, astonished,
hands over hearts, pointing to the sky,
arms extended. The elders seethe.
They all have the same face, the face of
the artist's father or his churlish patron
or the master who beat him.

Zaccheus, that wee little man, is up a tree,
jammed between branch and trunk,
looking far ahead for the cops.
The donkey that Jesus rides paces
patiently, her bemused face mirrored
in the foal beside her.

Jesus rides into the city
of ivory towers, turrets, and porticos.
The shouts of the crowd become
the cries of gulls: he is by the shore again,
that night of waves and lightning,
him stepping from peak to trough to peak.
He was strong, then, joyous — lifting and hurling
the storm. "Don't be afraid!" he called out then.

Now, just ahead, there is a bronzed
and tarnished door to a darkness
wide enough to take a man.

He raises a hand: we believe it
to be a blessing.

"Joy knows, and Longing has accepted,— 
only Lament still learns . . ." — Rilke

Friday's Lament goes out to the street,
lies down next to the dead child. Lament
claws open her breast. Darkness drops from the sky,
crouches, croaking, over the child. Lament is dumb
with horror; her mouth is a jagged Why?

Saturday's Longing paces the catacombs,
its damp walls glistening. He is an eye
braced wide in the darkness, gathering
possible light. He leans, listening — breath held —
toward the When.

Sunday's Joy trembles, She looks for her assailants
but does not find them. She puzzles at the How.
She touches the warm earth, she laughs!
She throws her arms wide and bows to the heavens.
"We shall dance! I am alive! We are still here."

Will we ever get away from it,
the words unsaid when loyalty is called for,
the bare loss of breath when doubled over
or the skin ticking past the darkened doorway?
An outthrust arm which grabs the shell in sand,
the stone uncovered that will fill the hand.

The grinding wrongs, capricious, arbitrary.
One favored, one denied by sleight of tongue.
And Abel always with a sideways glance,
smug even in his fear, rocks back upon his heels
from the fist. Brother mine, stand up! Don't spoil
the game we know so well with all your drama.

I could not know you unless we were at odds.
The flash of flint, the friction felt, our small explosions.
Our sandpaper selves will wear each other smooth.
If I had met you in a distant archipelago,
we would have fought at first, no words exchanged,
no quarter given nor expected from a higher code.

Someone asked me once if we were related.
He saw a marked resemblance in the eyes,
the line of jaw, the curl of lip, the coldness
in the smile. "Distantly," I said, but knew
that in the geometric radius of life, you are
the angle without which I'm incomplete.

I was trying to work this out:
those with nothing will lose even that.

And the other side: that more
will be given those who have much.

Someone pulled me aside
to whisper, "Use it or lose it, right?"

And their motto: "Those who have, win;
those who don't, won't."

There are people who will tell you
Jesus was the first venture capitalist.

That he desires for us what others sell:
limos, jets, homes and handbags.

But only if you believe irony is dead.
And forget he had no place to lay his head.

Jumping down from the train,
map in hand, I felt a lightness in the air
I had not known since Portugal.
The moment glanced up in a reel
made for memories of Florence in winter.

Hunger of three days sharpened my senses;
I became a mouth, a tongue, a feral dog,
tracking by scent and sound. Eyes wide open,
I stepped away from knowing. My breath
unwound, one moment by another.

By the foot of the hill was a little stand
mounded with pears ripely gold, a still life
fragrant with life. A single pear in its fullness
of time bridged body to soul, the juice
spurting down my chin to my hand.

In the softening bruise of New Year's Day,
Maurice Chevalier had died. Near the Ponte Vecchio
I paused as a radio hymned his song:
"Ah yes, I remember it well. . . ."
Oh yes, I remember that well.

I never saw his tears, my grandfather.
It wasn't done where he came from.
West Yorkshire men would only turn away.

There was no place for the sudden
stinging in one's eyes, the shudder
in the chest, tightening at the throat.

We were clawing boulders from
the hillside with a mattock and
a crowbar when he faltered,

stodd a moment with the crowbar
in his hand, his hair under his hat
ringed with sweat, his breath a quickened gasp.

That night I heard his footsteps
in another room and from the 
doorway glimpsed him pacing,

each turning in the moonlight
forced a breath, a stiffness
to his spine. Even in aloneness

he would not bow to pain,
but carried it upon his shoulders
like a cross,

his private Via Dolorosa,
counted by the minutes
and the hours of his steps.

Where the young girls sat in the sunshine
along the river and the young men
strutted and swore, thunder was heard.

Night came suddenly, sun sliced
to darkness. A curtain dropped
before the eyes of a thousand people,
millions more.

Memory was blind to the iron
and rust of history. No one had thought
the cities would swirl up again in flame,
dust and ashes eager for the sky.

The tulips were profligate that spring,
blood-red cups brimming, the sun
pouring into them like gold.

For Lent that year, they gave up fear.

I wake up from rivers running
through my dreams. When I say dreams,
I don't mean ten impossible things
I have set my heart upon.

When I say set my heart on,
I'm not casting my heart overhead,
tossing it up like a grappling hook,
hoping it will catch on the best.

When I say I hope for the best,
I haven't abandoned the rest —
that which I live toward each day,
one day much like another.

When I say one day is much like another,
I mean every day carries its sorrows,
I can breathe any day to gladness,
each day is a spring of new beginnings.

When I say new beginnings,
it begs the question of old beginnings,
broken ones limping through deep ruts,
world without end.

When I say world without end, I wonder
how long these dreams will pulse through my heart,
new water flowing each moment down the river,
bearing its sorrow, carrying its hope.

In a diner, making for
the coffee stand,
I paused for an aged woman,
as fragile as a shell.

Our paths wove together
in a stitchery of chance.
She would have given way
as rough custom demands:

old age bows to youth, female to male,
height and impatience trumping
courtesy and care.

"Thank you for noticing me,"
and her eyes glinted a little.
"When you're my age you are
invisible."

In the counting world
youth rises and whirls,
broad strokes and flash
springing off the feet.

Old age lifts memory
to its ear, a conch shell's
far-off ocean calling
faintly from within.

Then there is that anticipation
as the arm swings stiffly over,
pauses and delicately descends
upon the first groove.

If we still had carriages,
this would be the moment
when the beautiful young duchess alights
and glides up the steps of the opera house.

Or when the angel touches down
outside Mary's door, having burned
across the cosmos at the speed of light,
briefly touching up its hair, then bowing.

Just now, on the branch outside my window,
a thrush has landed. She will shake out her wings,
jitter to one side and back, cock her head,
and open her throat in a delight of song.