First Things RSS Feed - Jeanne Murray Walker

Road to Emmaus

Thu, 01 May 2014 00:00:00 -0400

After his funeral, which of the eleven
opted to find and mend their rotten nets
and fish?

And what made them set, again,
the clock to three years earlier, before all bets
were off for them, all odds mislaid? As if
they’d never thought he’d crown them big shots
in the coming kingdom.

They worked that skiff
like crazy. Can you blame them? What caught
their memories was his blank, gory face,
his odd slack jaw. Their minds were bending
around how wrong they’d been about his place.
And frankly, their own stories needed ending.

They met him at dusk. A maddening stranger
who told a cheerful story. What disaster?

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The Grudge

Mon, 01 Jan 1996 00:00:00 -0500

When he died he weighed sixty pounds,
the paper says, and I go out of my way
to drive by the address where his brother
locked him in the closet, wondering at
the blue door, the flower boxes,
wondering where the fury started ,
how early and how hidden the first bruise
awaking like a bat, dark wings beating like mad
beneath his skin, the grudge pretending
to fold itself and go to sleep. Years later,
some old random gesture startles it awake.
For instance, when Esau finally staggers home,
hypoglycemic, clothes torn, hungry,
Jacob sees his chance. He buys
the old farm from his brother for a crockpot
of lamb stew. Jacob would tell you
how, from the beginning he was the oldest
anyway. We were twins , he’d say reasonably,
stirring the soup, Esau poked his finger out
first so they tied a red thread to it
But I was the first one out! Me! There are records
to prove it. It’s hideous, when
you think about it, how everything followed
from that. You would like Jacob. Quick,
witty. He would flick his coat open
to show you the grudge, nursing like a bat.

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Visiting Parkers Prairie

Tue, 01 Mar 1994 00:00:00 -0500

“Time lost its absolute character . . .”
–Einstein

The Wilsons lived across the street,
and when kids knocked,
he gave us apples after school.
Years later we read she died of head wounds,
the hobo stepping in her blood,
running without taking anything.

I fly to my old neighborhood,
a street God kept so calm
the houses might have been
stitched on quilt squares.
When sunlight twists, I remember:
Mr. Wilson through a window,
shouting. Raising a hammer.

Then everything I thought gives way.
I fall in the giddy arc
from adoration into loathing,
clutching anything to hang onto
the way we grasp the arm rests
in the plane before
the pilot pitches us into space,
the spider web of metal quivering
around us.

What street can we be safe on?
Even the earth we cling to
is nothing but a twirling ball,
singing through a dark void,
and our faces, breasting the wind,
eyes dreaming like the figureheads on ships.
Even God is motion.

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The Summer of 1883

Sun, 01 Aug 1993 00:00:00 -0400

Oh, they chose, all right.
This is the New World:
no guarantee, but opportunity.
In one summer three crops,
like beautiful daughters,
have eloped with death’s sons.
One with grasshoppers,
one with drought, and one with hail.
Now they have no seed corn.
On their husk pallets
the children who remain
turn in the prison
of their thin ribs.
It’s only a matter of time
before the father will
have to take up the saw
and build another coffin.
By light of a candle
the mother washes the entrails
of a wild duck.
In the black cellar of its stomach
she discovers corn
new as morning,
enough to plant.
Look. She holds it up
in the dark bag of her hand,
another opportunity.
She looms tall as a church steeple.
She is holding the sun
in its vast pouch of space.

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Main Street, Parkers Prairie (Later Old Town)

Sun, 01 Aug 1993 00:00:00 -0400

They have waited all their lives
for train tracks to lace them to other towns,
and now the word comes down. The Soo Line will
build tracks and a depot, but two miles away.
The Soo Line will pay to move their houses.
They clash like caroms colliding,
some of them long to shoot two miles away,
some of them want to be buried where they are.

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