Original Fire by Louise Erdrich Page B

the heat of the flagstone,
    a transparent teaspoon of flesh,
    the tiny beak shut, the eyes still sealed
    within a membrane of the clearest blue.
     
    I buried the chick in a box of leaves.
    The rest grew fat and clamorous.
    I put my hands through the thorns one night and felt the bowl,
    the small brown begging bowl,
    waiting to be filled.
     
    By morning, the strands of the nest disappear
    into each other, shaping
    an emptiness within me that I make lovely
    as the immature birds make the air
    by defining the tunnels and the spirals
    of the new sustenance. And then,
    no longer hindered by the violence of their need,
    they take to other trees, fling themselves
    deep into the world.

4 Agnes
    When you entered the church at Basia
    holding the scepter of the almond’s
    white branch, and when you struck
    the bedrock floor, how was I to know
    the prayer would be answered?
    I heard the drum of hooves long in the distance,
    and I held my forehead to the stone of the altar.
    I asked for nothing. It is almost
    impossible to ask for nothing.
    I have spent my whole life trying.
     
    I know you felt it, when his love spilled.
    That ponderous light.
    From then on you endured
    happiness, the barge you pulled
    as I pull mine. This
    is called density of purpose.
    As you learned, you must shed everything else
    in order to bear it.
     
    That is why, toward the end of your life
    when at last there was nothing I could not relinquish,
    I allowed you to spring forward without me.
    Sister, I unchained myself. For I was always
    the heaviest passenger,
    the stone wagon of example,
    the freight you dragged all the way to heaven,
    and how were you to release yourself
    from me, then, poor mad horse,
    except by reaching the gate?

Mary Magdalene
    I wash your ankles
    with my tears. Unhem
    my sweep of hair
    and burnish the arch of your foot.
    Still your voice cracks
    above me.
     
    I cut off my hair and toss it across your pillow.
    A dark towel
    like the one after sex.
    I’m walking out,
    my face a dustpan,
    my body stiff as a new broom.
     
    I will drive boys
    to smash empty bottles on their brows.
    I will pull them right out of their skins.
    It is the old way that girls
    get even with their fathers—
    by wrecking their bodies on other men.

Christ’s Twin
    He was formed of chicken blood and lightning.
    He was what fell out when the jug tipped.
    He was waiting at the bottom
    of the cliff when the swine plunged over.
    He tore out their lungs with a sound like ripping silk.
    He hacked the pink carcasses apart, so that the ribs spread
    like a terrible butterfly, and there was darkness.
    It was he who turned the handle and let the dogs
    rush from the basements. He shoved the crust
    of a volcano into his roaring mouth.
    He showed one empty hand. The other gripped
    a crowbar, a monkey wrench, a crop
    which was the tail of the ass that bore them to Egypt,
    one in each saddlebag, sucking twists
    of honeyed goatskin, arguing
    already over a woman’s breasts.
    He understood the prayers that rose
    in every language, for he had split the human tongue.
    He was not the Devil nor among the Fallen—
    it was just that he was clumsy, and curious,
    and liked to play with knives. He was the dove
    hypnotized by boredom and betrayed by light.
    He was the pearl in the mouth, the tangible
    emptiness that saints seek at the center of their prayers.
    He leaped into a shadow when the massive stone
    rolled across the entrance, sealing him with his brother
    in the dark as in the beginning.
    Only this time he emerged first, bearing the self-inflicted wound, both brass halos
    tacked to the back of his skull.
    He raised two crooked fingers; the extra die
    tumbled from his lips when he preached
    but no one noticed. They were too busy
    clawing at the hem of his robe and planning
    how to sell him to the world.

Orozco’s Christ
    Who rips his own flesh down the seams and steps
    forth flourishing the ax,
    who chops down his own cross,
    who straddles it,
    who stares like a cat,
    whose