Two Poems
by Gary Fincke
After the Crucifixion Act
We exited, no one saying a word
About their souls at risk because we paid.
Jesus, I began, you already know
The secrets of re-enactment, the holes
Well-placed in the hands kept open with pegs,
Much like wearing gold through the ears and nose.
You know the history of its illusion,
Including Tommy Minnock, famously
Singing "After the Ball is Over" while
Nailed to a cross, and Mortado, who hid
blood packs in his permanent stigmata.
Jesus, I confess to re-enactment,
Waking before sunrise to stand in snow
To see my shadow stretch into forecast.
Childish? I've driven to Kent State, in May,
To stand in the spaces where classmates died.
I've played annual martyr for nothing
But rage at anyone in uniform.
Last week, at Gettysburg, the costumed blue
And gray marched in the early July heat,
And I met three Confederates who smoked
Behind a bar, drunk enough to believe
I wanted to hear each place they'd been shot
That afternoon, one dying ten steps short
Of Cemetery Ridge. "Right here," he said,
Pointing to his chest, and I thought he might
Open his nineteenth-century shirt to
A scar like my father lately come down
From the cross of surgery, heart restored,
Singing his own hymn to resurrection,
Telling me, "Touch it," and pressing my hand
To the raised evidence of miracle.
Jesus, you already know someone, once,
Suffered nails driven through his unmarked hands
And feet, forcing his audience to flee.
You already know it's the illusion
We want, the crucified returning for
Curtain calls, smiling and accepting praise.
Don't we wound enough with the hammered spikes
Of love? This summer a neighbor kidnapped
His former wife from the hospital where
She worked and fucked her on his van's back seat
Before shooting her. He pointed the gun
At his head and pantomimed suicide
Until he rolled aside the van's blue door
And surrendered himself to the future.
And now I can't stop following these words
To something worse than paid-for blasphemy,
Re-enacting the hell of history
With the terrible fear you may hear me.
THE OPEN HEART
In disaster movies, someone
Is always laid out for surgery,
Chest opened, when the earthquake strikes
Or the hurricane hits. Things blacken
Until the emergency lights
Come on, a generator running
Not quite strong enough to keep bulbs
From blinking, the room from turning hot.
As soon as the second plane struck,
The brief idea of accident
Exploding into fear, I tried
To mark how many of those patients.
Survived surgery while the world
Was changing because someone I knew
Was having his constricted heart
Paused, just then, for delicate repair.
We murmured in the waiting room,
The language veering from curse to prayer,
All that morning, our attention
To the news flickered as if our hearts
Were blinking off as well, dimming
To the darkness of apprehension
Where the anaesthetized can hear
The saddened voices of their surgeons.
He was going to die or wake
An afterthought for everyone but
Those who loved him. All of the talk
On television sounded like what
I'd heard a hundred times: Wreckage
And triage, evacuation, rescue,
The baffled crowd of civilians
Enveloped by clouds of toxic dust.
The future was a chest scar. A blue cough.
The word suddenly sparkled like a stroke.
Gary Fincke's most recent poetry collections are The Fire Landscape (2008) and Standing Around the Heart (2005), both from the University of Arkansas Press. His collection of stories, Sorry I Worried You, won the Flannery O'Connor Prize and was published by the University of Georgia Press. His next book will be a memoir to be published by Michigan State University Press in 2010. He directs the Writers Institute at Susquehanna University (gfincke@susqu.edu).