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CHAFED HEART

Joan Marie Hutchison

chafe = to wear away or irritate by rubbing; to vex or annoy; to warm by rubbing
(AHD)

I.

As it couches in the breached horizon, bleeding into liquid sky, does the peached orb rise on hinged strings or sink, swallowed in earth?

Bent in a broken place, the dazed, heated travellers follow pull of gravity, pull of grave, their puppet heads propped up by wiry spines. Vigil spent, they spend steps to some faceless town away from this Jerusalem, cemetery of a dream. Donning the cloak of the familiar, they stumble in the broad dance; the banal monotony of cyclic hope and fall. Sun sears sieved cloaks , with sand clotting between toes. And beneath rippled brows, these shadows rehearse the vision lying like shards, like bloody petals beneath the feet. Oh, God, they say, Let not these walking clothes become our shrouds. We farm tears. What bleak crop lies before us, queued for the slash of the sickle?

Who is the stranger fool, this bull who smashes their porcelain interiors? Dishes chip and tremble. How he dares to bid them unearth their swollen mouths of bitter herbs, of unleavened bread.

II.

Yet the veil of the stranger is a mirror. The photograph develops against a blank sheet.

Faint footfalls of Grecian myth. Virtuous Alcestis dies as substitute for a hapless husband, to spare him darkness and the grave, but rose from the depths of dark, rescued by drunken Herakles who exposed the weakness of a shorn and sober man who vows fealty to his late wife and falls to the temptation of the veiled lady in a day. The veil exposed him, removed his own veil, even as we unveil ourselves in speech, expose the hollow of our heart's gaping wound.

And the veil becomes a river. For in the flow of words from the veiled stranger - with one layer removed, he joins the tributaries of scriptures that feed into a Messiah who swells the banks of the entire riverbed. As Moses wrote, one who will bruise the head of the serpent. The deliver. The stone the builders rejected, now capstone. And then in all the premonitions of him - death, burial and resurrection -

Abraham, Joseph, Moses, David - all having promises buried in prison or desert wilderness or withered womb. The crushed and fallen fragments become the seed of the great.

III.

And then this. As they bid him to dine, these travellers, humbled at the hands of a fool, he breaks their bread and they see Him in another cosmic game of hide and seek.

Here the heavens whispered He was one whom the heavens gripped. At birth, the spectacle of sequined stars and belled angels tuned the spheres to split the ink of night. At his cross the torrent of heaven unleashed the tortured symphony of clouds, drums, lightning, all wrapped around the flying embers of his purged breath, the scape - goat/lamb spiked on a thorny stake.

But here, in the dull aftermath, the heavens are silent amid the trickle of hysterical rumors. Only now do these dim disciples connect the cacophonous rhythm of miracle and myth, of promise destroyed only to arise veiled and swollen. God's intrusion's are often clothed with foolishness and the burn of irritation. Did not our hearts burn, they say. They untangle their writhing sackcloth and stream away the ash.

IV.

Unfix my heart gnarled like fist. Even now this blood/wine priest splits my bread/flesh, and slips through walls - without door or window. He rips the rubber walls of my skin and breaks the little logic box I placed Him in. The same fire that stoked their hearts burns here. My Peter promises and Thomasine doubts are my own sackcloth and ash. I hear the cock crowing, even as my fingers poke the air. Still, at the break of His voice, lava swells beneath the skin. These shards of pain are partial images, like the misplaced eye of the viewfinder.

Only as I constrain fools to enter do I see God. Only as He crumbles my flesh may I leap from trenches to dance spry and sinewy on ground where I have fallen. Dance before another chorus of dim disciples singing a dirge.

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