Letters to a Stranger

BY THOMAS JAMES

I

In April we will pierce his body.

It is March. Snow is dust over the branches.

A pony hunches in the orchard.

I stand at the frozen mouth of the river,

Thinking of you.

In the house where you live

Frost glitters on the windows

Like uncounted pieces of silver.

Already they are preparing the wine and the bread.

II

The field is banked with purple asters

And a spill of mustard flowers.

The earth has taken on terrible proportions.

Out in an unused meadow

The wildflowers have already covered

The delicate bones of an Indian.

Bees are flying across the meadow

To a hive under the rafters of the barn.

Someone is leading a horse with crippled bones

Into the spikes of clover.

III

Alexander died this morning,

Leaving his worldly possessions

To the strongest.

I watched an empire fade across his lips.

They propped him in the sun a while,

And then three women came to scour his body

Like a continent.

I am afraid of what the world will do.

Only this afternoon

I heard two worms conversing

In the shadow of his breastbone.

I slipped out of the palace

And entered a vein of gillyflowers

On the edge of potter’s field.

I will not be missed.

No one even noticed.

IV

I have been thinking of the son

I would like to have.

The leaves have all gone yellow

Overnight, wrinkling like hands

In the updraught.

I drove my car by the creek

Because I had nowhere else to go.

The milkweed’s delicate closet had been fractured,

Filling the air with rumors.

Despite all I could do, the sumac

Had taken on the color of a mouth.

Tonight, I perceive the young girls

In my mother’s blood

Letting their seed pass by unnoticed,

A red nativity.

V

Last night they dragged the canal

For an old man’s body.

Now he is singing for a hook

Just below water level.

A branch of ice is splitting open

Across each window,

And snow is dismantling the weeds

Like the breakable furniture of a boudoir.

I have been rereading your letters.

It is too cold for a virgin birth to occur

Even in the frosty suburbs

Of a wildflower.

VI

I have learned to camouflage myself in church,

Masking my body

With the body of a saint.

Last night frost glazed the face of Mary Magdalene,

And snow rode up to the altar windows.

Before morning, the sparrows came down

To the body of Saint Francis.

Now he is upholstered in oak leaves

Like a living room chair.

This morning we are preparing a crucifixion.

I am thinking of you now.

With the velvet at my knees

And the silverware shining on the altar

And the stained glass moving out of focus

And the cross veiled in black,

I am present for the news of an enormous death.

I take the bread on my tongue

Like one of Christ’s fingers,

And the wine rides through my breast

Like a dark hearse.

All the while I am thinking of you.

An avalanche of white carnations

Is drifting across your voice

As it drifts across the voices of confession.

But the snow keeps whispering of you over and over.