Free Holy Heathen Rhapsody by Pattiann Rogers Page B

quiver,
    every one, every single one, is beheld and declared.

THE SNOW OF THINGS
    I don’t know if Jesus ever walked
    in snow, through a storm of snow
    blowing icy pieces stinging against
    his face, in his eyes, snow melting
    and freezing again in his hair until
    it hung in stiff cords on his shoulders,
    against his forehead. I’ve never seen
    him pictured that way.
    I don’t know if he ever witnessed snow,
    Jesus the Christ wrapped in robes that couldn’t
    keep out a winter wind of the mildest kind.
    He would have had to swaddle his feet
    and sandals in layers of cloth to walk through
    the snow of a mountain pass, using his staff
    along the narrows of slippery rocky paths.
    Once in a May storm, I saw a hummingbird
    hovering momentarily outside the window,
    caught in a late spring freeze and snow-filled
    fog. He was tiny iridescent feathers of green
    and rose. He was a flittering bead of living color
    taking off against the gray monument of winter.
    I wonder if people would have followed
    Jesus, climbing a mountain through the snow,
    gathering around him there to listen, the wind
    screaming its own beatitudes, whipping up
    sudden gusts and shifts of snow descending
    again over them like night. Hooded,
    crouched down close together and sleeted
    with snow, they might have resembled
    a flock of sheep huddled on the hillside.
    Once I saw a work of art lying abandoned
    in the hoarfrost and snow of a forest clearing,
    Van Gogh’s
Starry Night
lying frayed among
    the stiff and rattling grasses, that deep swirling
    blue sky of bursting suns and splitting stars slowly
    being buried by pearl on icy pearl of drift.
    He could have told them the parable
    of the blindness of snow-filled fogs
    and white-outs, or the parable of the linking
    prisms and patterns of any single flake,
    or the parable of the transfiguration
    by snow of needles, thorns, and jagged
    stones. The breath of his words might
    have been seen as a holy ghost of warmth
    in the paralysis of that killing cold.
    I don’t know if Jesus ever witnessed snow.
    It may never have snowed in Galilee,
    although it is written that he rose
    to heaven in “raiments white as snow.”

WHITEOUT: THE DISAPPEARANCE OF IMPOSSIBILITIES
    Anything could appear to me here now,
    walking in this obfuscation of snow and fog,
    a true blizzard, if the wind were swifter.
    Totally veiled, I move on legs I can’t see,
    parting endless screens and doorways
    of chilling silk and ice-threaded smoke.
    A black swan might float before me
    at any moment, a hand’s breadth
    from my face, emerging suddenly
    through this solid alabaster, a swan
    so black it’s a mere vacancy of bird,
    a perfect absence of itself. I could easily
    proceed, entering the fall of its body,
    its wings spreading into their own deep
    hollows as it vanishes with me.
    And it seems altogether probable
    that a white wagon hung with ivory
    orchids and pale ferns and pulled by white
    sea turtles could pass silently
    above me, trailing slithers of pellucid
    flying fish and ribbon eels twisting
    through swells of icy dust.
    Many crippled angels attend me here,
    hovering on all sides. My breath,
    the same color as this storm, floats
    through their snow-filled wimples, swirling
    their gauzy pantaloons. Coming in and out
    of existence as I touch them, they regard me,
    holding their muslin canopies over my head,
    reciting prayers of blindness. In my vertigo,
    I posit these angels now, not as beings,
    but as fictions of time creating
    the framework of a necessary place.
    This dizzy loss, this dizzy loss is the same
    loss, the same gain as dancing slowly
    nowhere, eyes closed, with a boy I remember,
    a boy who draws me closer, taking me in,
    as a winter landscape filled with drowning
    seas of descending snow takes in
    and transfigures all previous boundaries.
    Just now a christ with white eyes
    touched my face. I felt the drift
    of his hand across my forehead, his fingertips
    brushing with Braille lightness