a crucifixion and a mysterion

Crucifixion

You understand the colors on the hillside have faded,

we have the gray and brown and lavender of late autumn,

the apple and pear trees have lost their leaves, the mist

of November is often with us, especially in the afternoon

and toward evening, as it was today when I sat gazing

up into the orchard for a long time the way I do now,

thinking of how I died last winter and was revived.

And I tell you I saw there a cross with a man nailed

to it, silvery in the mist, and I said to him: "Are you

the Christ?" And he must have heard me, for in his

agony, twisted as he was, he nodded his head affirmatively,

up and down, once and twice. And a little way off

I saw another cross with another man nailed to it,

twisting and nodding, and then another and another,

ranks and divisions of crosses straggling like exhausted

legions upward among the misty trees, each cross

with a silvery, writhing, twisting, nodding, naked

figure nailed to it, and some of them were women.

The hill was filled with crucifixion. Should I not be

telling you this? Is it excessive? But I know something

about death now, I know how silent it is, silent, even

when the pain is shrieking and screaming. And tonight

is very silent and very dark. When I looked I saw

nothing out there, only my own reflected head nodding

a little in the window glass. It was as if the Christ

had nodded to me, all those writhing silvery images

on the hillside, and after a while I nodded back to him.

Carruth, Hayden. "Crucifixion" The Best American Poetry 1990. Toronto: Collier Macmillan Canada, Inc., 1990.

Adventures in New Testament Greek: Mysterion

What our habit has attained for us appears

a somewhat meager view of mystery.

And Latinate equivalents have fared

no better tendering the palpable

proximity of dense noetic pressure.

More familiar, glib, and gnostic bullshit

aside, the loss the body suffers when

sacrament is pared into a tiny

picture postcard of absent circumstance

starves the matter to a moot result, no?

Mysterion is of a piece, enormous

enough to span the reach of what we see

and what we don't. The problem at the heart

of metaphor is how neatly it breaks down

to this and that. Imagine one that held

entirely across the play of image

and its likenesses. Mysterion is

never elsewhere, ever looms, indivisible

and here, and compasses a journey one

assumes as it is tendered on a spoon.

Receiving it, you apprehend how near

the Holy bides. You cannot know how far.

Cairns, Scott. "Adventures in New Testament Greek: Mysterion" New & Selected Poems. Lincoln, Nebraska: Zoo Press, 2002.