By Tom Sleigh
1
The cathedral being built
around our split level house was so airy, it stretched
so high it was like a cloud of granite
and marble light the house rose up inside.
At the time I didn't notice masons laying courses
of stone ascending, flying buttresses
pushing back forces that would have crushed our flimsy wooden beams.
But the hammering and singing of the guilds went on
outside my hearing, the lancets' stained glass
telling how a tree rose up from Jesse's loins whose
flower was Jesus staring longhaired from our bathroom wall where I
always wanted to ask if this was how he
really looked, slender, neurasthenic, itching for privacy
as the work went on century after century.
2
Fog in cherry trees, deer strapped
to bumpers, fresh snow marked
by dog piss shining frozen in the day made
a parallel cathedral unseen but intuited
by eyes that took it in and went on to the next
thing and the next as if unbuilding
a cathedral was the work
that really mattered--not knocking
it down which was easy--
but taking it apart stone
by stone until all
that's left is the cathedral's
outline coming in and out of limbo
in the winter sun.
3
All through childhood on eternal sick day afternoons,
I lived true to my name, piling dominoes
into towers, fingering the white dots like the carpenter Thomas
putting fingertips into the nail-holes of his master's hands.
A builder and a doubter. Patron saint of all believers
in what's really there every time you look:
black-scabbed cherry trees unleafed in winter,
the irrigation ditch that overflows at the back
of the house, chainlink of the schoolyard
where frozen footsteps in the snow
criss-cross and doubleback. And now the shroud falls away
and the wound under his nipple seeps fresh blood.
And when Jesus says, Whither I go you know,
Thomas says, We know not...how can we know the way?
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It was clear but cold on Wednesday, meaning that there is still snow on the ground, but the big news here is that younger son has passed his driving test and now has a Maryland drivers license! (Which of course he took advantage of pretty much as soon as we got home from the MVA, driving to Starbucks without us.) The wait was only moderate and everyone we talked to at the MVA was friendly for a change except they told me to move the car from the test lane after he passed the test, then didn't want to let me back in the building because they had technically closed five minutes earlier, d'oh.
We watched the second episode of The 100, which is mediocre and derivative in most ways, but the three smartest characters are all women (possibly the four smartest, it's hard to tell about one of the girls), so much is forgiven. Then we watched The Americans, where I spent the whole episode worrying one woman was going to kill another woman (I still think that ultimately that's the likely endgame -- that or the woman's husband -- which is upsetting). Here are a few more photos of what really had better be the last snowstorm of the spring, plus one from this afternoon when it was melting!
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