Stuart Harris

Mary and Mary and Salome 
encountered a young man 
who told them he was alive 
but they were scared 
and didn't tell anyone.

Or they came and told
Peter and the rest of us.
Or maybe he appeared 
only to Mary Magdalene, 
still smelling of sweet perfume 
and she came and told all of us 
as we were mourning, 
trying to make sense 
of a huge new absence 
at the center of our lives.

Accounts vary.

If she came, we didn't believe her.
We had seen him die.
We know what death is.

Of course, if the three women 
just ran away, scared,
then how do I know all of this?
Where do I even find the voice 
to tell you this story?
My syllables are just a scribbler's 
cynical trick, a metafiction.

So he must have come to us 
when we were eating, scolding us 
because we know what death is.
He said some hard words.
Those who keep believing 
in death will be condemned.
Those who don't can drink 
poison and play with snakes.
He said we would speak 
in strange tongues.

Luke remembers it differently.
He showed us his hands and feet.
He ate fish with us.
Luke recalls soft talk of forgiveness, 
raised hands, blessings.

But I remember something harder 
and stranger-judgment
and an otherworldliness in his eyes.

I don't even remember the trip to Bethany 
though Luke swears we walked.
I just remember that he was gone again.

But somehow this second loss, 
this absence after impossible presence, 
was different, compelling us to go, 
to tell people, to shape words 
that helped others stop, 
stand up straight,
and lay their sicknesses aside.

I bend to kiss my mother goodbye.
"Are you going back to work?" she says.
"I'm going home," I answer.
"Work?" she says. "No, home."
"Work?" "Home." "Work?" "Home" "Work?" "Home."
She finally just shrugs, as if home 
were a ridiculous place to go at 7:15 
in the coming dark of a cool evening
in the middle of October.

Driving west, I watch the last vestiges
of pink and orange slip into nothing.
I try to visualize my mother's brain,
filled with blood 18 months ago,
now struggling to make connections.

Is it the size of an egg in the chicken house? 
or of a walnut fallen in the front yard 
of the house in Claysville, Alabama, 
where her family sharecropped— 
the happiest days of her life,
she once told me, months before the morning 
when she came to breakfast and asked me 
if I had found the sheets in the bathroom?
I had already fetched the towels from the dryer 
and managed to let her know this.

In the car, my daughter, wide-eyed, said,
"Daddy, she said, 'sidelake.’”  I know, 
I said, driving away, taking her to a swim meet 
and a graduation party and then home, 
only to return the next evening
to pick my mother up off the bathroom floor, 
dress her, and take her to the ER.

Are the neurons a frayed network 
where the ends don't quite meet?
A sixty-year-old Star Flower quilt 
with the stuffing exposed?
A dress worn too many Sundays?
A coat that has seen 
too many winters, stretched thin 
in the interest of shoes, books, corn?

What does it feel like to hear the words 
leave her mouth, different from the words 
in her egg-shaped or walnut-sized mind?
To have this fool just keep repeating "home,"
as if that were a place one could go.

Is it like trying to communicate 
with a 20-year-old son who knows it all, 
who just comes home on weekends to eat 
wash clothes, show off his newfound 
college ideas, use words like "social constructs,"
"hegemony," "deconstruction," "Derrida"?
This son, who is always already driving away.