All right.
I'll start-- Is that Flanoy?
Do you remember me, Flanoy?
It's Mr. Quiz.
Hi, Mr. Quiz.
What a shame a kid like you dead as a door nail as dodo dead.
How'd they get you?
You go against, you break their rules.
How'd they eat too much sweets or touch yourself?
What you in for?
What's the charge?
How'd they get you?
Dead to rights?
"Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam."
Lesefario was a thinking man.
A long time dead.
They had time.
They had minutes, seconds, hours, years.
What they lacked were calendars, clocks.
Only the Speidel niceties, digital readouts,
the quartz accounts, only the Greenwich
and atomic certainties.
He'd begun to speculate about the meaning of death.
He had never questioned life's meaning.
He had assumed it had none.
Life was its own gloss where conditions changed you
didn't look for explanations.
He'd lived in Minnesota, a Minneapolis kid,
schoolboy, adult. He'd had his friends and later his cronies.
He'd had his shot at stuff, enjoyed much and been
disappointed by the rest.
He'd like television, a wonderful invention
but had not known when he'd married her that his wife would
turn out to be a depressive, a woman who she couldn't help it,
he guess, but it made things awful
and spoiled everything that should have been fun.
Their trips to restaurants, their cruise
to the islands, their daughter's childhood
was never to be pleased by things who wore
her melancholy like a rash.
Life had not signified.
Death was another story.
So time consuming.
We had time.
So draining, demanding, taking not just
kids but all their attentions.
He went over the pain not causeless sadness,
like his wife, but to a suffering like Wallenda stage
fright, the not knowing from one moment to the next
they had time.
Whether what had to be endured and would be endured ever
could be endured.
Death made no sense.
But it meant something.
Unless a farrier formulated this last proposition
he decided that he must try to save them.
To become heroic in hell who had been a clerk in a Minneapolis
liquor store in a red line neighborhood, who had opened up
in the morning always a little scared of the winos
around the entrance, always a little scared of the Blacks,
always a little scared of people who
asked him to cash their checks, always a little
scared of teenagers, of miners who showed him phony ID
cards of the big beefy delivery men of customers of anyone
who would even come into a liquor store.
What could he do, he asked himself.
And why should he do it?
Who was he?
Stuck away down here stashed for the duration
in some nameless base camp of hell.
A thoughtful fraidy cat formerly in the liquor trade,
or no, not even the liquor trade.
A clerk in the making change trade whose last human contact
would be had been with the trigger happy jerk Lesefario
had known was coming for 15 years.
And so scared he knew because he knew as soon as the guy came
through the door he was the last human being
he'd ever see trying to size him up, though fear hurt his eyes.
And Lesefario lost his face like to center fielder, a ball
in the sun.
That even if he lived he would never
be able to pick the thug out of a lineup,
acknowledging even in that first brief bruised view of him
all that he and his murderer, did they get good reviews?
Were their names household words?
Was their health all it should be,
or their children top drawer had in common?
And if this was the fellow and if this was it,
why shouldn't the killer be made to feel
the force of that astonishing fact?
If you're all I have for death bed, Lesefario had said,
then I want your attention.
I guess most folks die out of their element,
DOA by circumstance and only, hey, you, no tricks.
The night shift in attendance, no tricks, I said.
Hands high and shut up because I'm
going to have to teach you a lesson,
the killer said and cut him down before he
could teach the killer one.
His last word because in a life he'd already decided it
didn't make sense.
And a good thing too, Lesefario thought.
Groping for the last words, he still
couldn't formulate that given months, years
he could not finally have put together.
So he had an idea that they would have been simple.
Why had he wanted to make the point
that he would have been 52 years old on his next birthday?
So who in hell, ha, ha, he thought,
was he who had missed out on life to discover death meaning
or to try to save them?
Just who in hell did he think he was, the Christ of the boonies?
So we grabbed the first one he saw stinging him
with his temperature.
[GRUNTS]
The fellow shrieked, pushing Lesefario off.
It's all right, he said from where he had fallen in hell.
It's all right.
Listen to me.
Are you listening?
It's 4:54 PM Tuesday June, 2007 7,804.
Say what?
That's the time.
Quiz told me the time when he was translated
and I've been keeping track.
Time?
For 4:54.
Yes, it's too big a job for one man.
Tell the others.
We've got to keep track.
Why?
Hurry.
1200, 1300, 1400, please, 1600.
Why do we have to know the time?
Don't argue because the meaning of death.
2,100 and beginning again.
100, 2,100.
The meaning of death is how long it takes!
Quiz was a queer funny man, Flanoy thought.
So we might be all right or we wouldn't be here, would he?
He'd been down in hell with the bad men.
Was it a sin not to like an angel?
He'd ask mother Mary.
Maybe he'd tell her some of the wicked things Quiz had done.
Still he thought he'd better not say anything that
could get Mr. Quiz in trouble.
He was the only one who had known Flanoy.
He knew me when I lived.
He heard me laugh.
He saw me throw.
In hell they were chanting the time.
The Buckcherry nomads were chanting,
the Finns were chanting, Frenchmen chanted in French,
Dutchman in Dutch, all over hell the billions
who had died each in his own demonic way,
sometimes to himself, often aloud,
uttered the special syllables he'd learned
would fill up a second.
Michigan hydrangeas, Cleveland for its tea,
a woman from the Australian outback
said while her companion, a performing
dwarf for Spanish mercenaries kept the silent running tab.
Lesefario who had given a downbeat which was already
obsolete by the time it reached a party of Greek skiers killed
in avalanche had actual days behind hand when it got
to a Soviet film star died of a fever on a trip to Japan
declared he was in contact with Quiz.
Though their techniques were primitive,
he received periodic corrections from Quiz himself
in communication with the sacred authorities pleading
their case.
An eyewitness he told them to their Devil's Island
circumstance.
An eyewitness, a brother.
They must keep counting, Lesefario said.
2:00 AM, Sunday, July 10, 7,804, or 1005, 1006, 100--
Count, count, its Houston control here, count.
The state of the art isn't so hot yet
but that isn't important.
So long as we keep counting we'll
get corrections from Quiz.
Count, any second may be the last.
"What's that astrology?"
said this ancient denizen in hell.
No, no, Lesefario said feelingly.
It's important.
I've seen it all and it's just another fad,
the tortured man said.
It's some self-help do it yourself scam.
You don't mean shit.
One guy had us praying, knees bowed and brimstone.
Praying?
Turned hell into bloody Sunday school.
Sacred authorities by third degree burns.
1800, 1900.
But not even his own heart in it.
His flash in the pan, hopes and heroics extinguished.
But we would probably keep counting a while they had time.
Someone trying to keep rally alive,
a plant and an audience milking ovation, a guy at a party going
sour suggesting the song which would bring them
together again.
Mother Mary.
Yes, Flanoy.
Was Jesus lonely?
Lonely?
Because he didn't have brothers because he didn't have sisters.
I don't think he was lonely.
Were their kids to play with?
It was so long ago I hardly remember.
He could do lots of stuff in the desert.
It'd be just like the beach.
Yes.
You could go barefoot.
You could bury kids in the sand with a pail of water
from the Oasis.
You could make things.
Did Jesus do that stuff?
I hardly remember.
Maybe he didn't have anyone to play with.
Maybe that's why you don't remember.
He worked with his father.
He helped his father.
His father?
He helped my husband, Mary said, blushing.
Flanoy nodded.
Back home, back home there was always plenty to do.
Do you miss being home?
I miss my mother, Flanoy said.
Oh, Flanoy, Marry said and held out her arms.
The Virgin comforted the sobbing child.
She cupped the back of the noise head
in her large soft hand, his legs between her knees
his small slim body pressed against her bosom
made a discreet comfortable weight.
Mary touched by the child's sweet ultimate homesickness
reached around him and took all his weight now,
gathering the little boy onto her lap,
both their bodies shedding angle temperature and impediment
resolved into the soft semiotics of need
and competence, the tongue and groove aptitudes of love.
This is heresy, she thought, indifferent to the idea
and hugged him closer.
All her supple maternals alive returned from helplessness
fetched back intact 2000 years.
Soon his body will begin to bite,
she thought, his tears, the shape.
Yet she made no adjustments, no move to kiss him off
with a final squeeze.
It was not even a pieta, no long lame lap fall.
Literally, she cradled him in her arms.
His knees near his chest as one might carry a child high up
in water.
"Better?," she asked.
Yes, maam.
He climbed down from her lap and seated
himself cross-legged beside her as a child in short pants.
She stroked his head.
Her fingers trailing her forgetful comfortable doodle
in his fine hair.
She dozed.
Christ was there, Joseph was, Flanoy was gone.
"Where's the child?," she asked.
Flanoy, go on off, her son said.
He's a good boy.
You're good to him, Madonna.
I was in time for the Tableau.
He wanted to know if you had playmates.
He wanted to know if you were lonely.
"Who is this kid, Mary?"
her husband asked.
What do we know about him anyway?
His name's Flanoy, she told him weerily.
He's from Minnesota.
He's dead.
Big deal, who ain't dead?
Mother is comfortable with the dead.
With you maybe not so comfortable, Joseph said.
Bamboozler, do you know how tired the woman gets?
What a strain?
Come clean, why don't you?
Admit you ain't him.
Please Joseph, I have a mouth.
You've got a mouth, use it.
Tell him go on.
What, you're so crazy about these people it makes
a difference he ain't Messiah?
Oh please, Christ said.
Both of you, Mary said.
You're tired, Joseph said, he woke you
this one, your son, the magic cripple who bumps into things.
Both of you, please, Mary said.
We're going, Joseph said.
We're going, get some rest.
Flanoy, she called softly when they had gone.
Flanoy, who no longer brought his violin she noticed,
who came now whenever she felt need of him,
who seemed to feel her need even before she did,
who anticipated it and suddenly appeared and climbed
into her lap and asked about them, questions about Jesus,
about Joseph, myself, things not in the Bible,
how she felt when she found out who her son was, if they'd
taken vacations together as his family had,
if it was always religious, if she'd heard from Jesus when
he was in the wilderness all that time, whether she'd
believe she'd ever see him again after they killed him,
and trading his history for hers,
filling her in on the world if only his limited experience
of it but knowing more real history from his brief decade
on Earth than she knew for all her millennia in the sky.
"And what could she know?"
Flanoy asked.
Did history say its prayers?
Did she know that the slaves had been freed
or the names of state capitals?
Did she know there was TV now, movies?
He told her movies he'd seen, breaking her heart
as you recounted sad stories about children, their animals,
faithful dogs and Noble horses, how the children had
to put them away themselves when they were injured,
the lessons they'd learned.
And making her laugh when he told her the comedy's saying,
though she knew all about this, how loved she was, how honored,
winning her over as she did him with confidences,
telling his secrets, climbing on her lap as he grew tired,
his soft comfortable body almost meant to be there.
And now maybe Jesus had a right to be jealous.
And all manner of things spoken of which
she had never spoken of and one day bringing his violin.
I've been practicing, he said, and played
to perfection grand compositions he had never
heard even in heaven.
Well, you're so good, she said.
Yes, he said, I think I'm inspired, and played
a melody that left both of them in tears.
The child so wracked by the beauty
that he could not finish.
Come, she said, sit-in my lap.
And Flanoy climbed up and Mary held him.
The lovely melody still echoing somewhere in memory, the
both of them still listening.
Ah, she said.
Ah, said Flanoy.
And afterwards in the stillness as if they both heard together
not only the melody but when it had stopped,
Flanoy asked his question.
Was it like that?
What?
When God-- you know.
When God?
He toyed with the color of her gown,
his gentle fingers lightly tracing the line of her throat
and it was as if she blossomed itch,
itch just as he assuaged it, need just as he answered it.
When God put Jesus in you.
When God?
When God.
Do you know how he did it?
Did you know it was him?
I mean you were a virgin.
Did you never suspect--
"You!"
she screamed and flung him from her lap.
But what did I do?
You're at me again.
"Wasn't one time enough?"
she pointed at the child on the floor and shouted.
"What did I do?"
Flanoy asked, crying.
I didn't do anything.
What did I do?
He sobbed and ran from the room.
I'm carrying his child, shrieked the Virgin Mary.
God gave a gala, levee at the Lord's.
Give me, he said, that old time religion.
His audience beamed.
They cheered.
They ate it up.
They nudged each other in Paradise.
"What did I tell you?" he said, over their enthusiasm.
It's terrific, isn't it?
I told you it would be terrific.
All you ever had to do was play nice.
Are you disappointed?
Is this Heaven?
Is this God's country?
In your wildest dreams, let me hear it.
Good.
In your wildest dreams, did you dream such a Treasury,
this museum Paradise?
Did you dream my thrones and dominions, my angels
And fly-over, my seraphim disporting
like dolphins, tumbling God's sky
in high Heaven's high acrobacy?
Did you imagine the miracles casual card tricks or ever
suspected free lunch could taste so good?
They should see you now, huh?
They should see you now, trembling in rapture
like neurological rut.
Delicious, correct?
Piety a la mode.
That's it.
That's right.
Sing hallelujah.
Sing Hozzoner's hosannas, Jehovah's gee whiz.
Well, God said, that's enough.
That will do.
He looked toward the Holy Family,
studying them for a moment.
"Not like the creche, eh?"
he said.
Well, is it?
"Is it?" he demanded of Jesus.
No, Christ said softly.
No, God said, not like the creche.
Just look at this place--
the dancing waters and indirect lighting.
I could put gambling in here, off-track betting.
Oh, oh, my costume jewelry ways, my game show vision.
Well, it's the public.
You've got to give it what it wants.
Yes, Jesus?
Yes, Jesus said it just doesn't look lived in
is that what you think?
Call on someone else, Christ said.
Sure, God said.
I'm Hero of Heaven.
I call on myself.
That was when he began his explanations.
He revealed the secrets of books of pictures and music,
telling them all manner of things--
why marches were less rousing than waltzes,
lieder more stirring than scat, why landscapes
were to be preferred over statues, how portraits of women
were superior to portraits of men but less impressive
than engravings on postage.
He explained why oceanography was
a purer science than mathematics,
biography a higher form than dance.
He told them how to choose wines and why
the tenor voice was more acceptable to him
than the baritone.
He told them the secret causes of inflation--
it's the markup, he said--
and which was the best color and how many angels could
dance on the head of a pin.
He explained why English was the first language at the Miss
Universe pageant and recited highlights
from the 18-minute gap.
Mary, wondering if she showed yet,
was glad that Joseph was next to her.
Determined to look proud, she deliberately
took her husband's hand.
So rough, she thought.
Such stubby fingers.
He explained why children suffered and showed them how
to do the latest disco steps.
He showed them how to square the circle, cautioning afterwards
that it would be wrong.
He revealed the name of Kennedy's assassin
and told them how to shop for a used car.
Why, he's talking to me, Quiz thought.
These other folks couldn't ever have had any use for this crap.
He's talking to me.
Quiz was right.
But he had something for everyone.
He was unloading, giving off wisdom like radioactivity,
plumbing the mysteries.
And now his voice was reasonable,
not the voice of a grandfather but of a king, a chief,
someone unelectable, there always,
whose very robes and signals of office
were not expensive or even rare so much
as his, as if he wore electricity or mountain range
or clothed himself in waterfall.
He explained-- I am the Manitou, too--
how the rain dance worked.
They were charmed.
He described how he had divided the light
from the darkness on the morning of the first day.
They were impressed.
He demonstrated how he had done Hell.
They were awed.
You have wondered, he said, why things are as they are.
You have wondered.
You have speculated.
You have questioned my motives.
Groans of denial went up from the saints.
He ignored them.
Why, the philosophers asked, so piecemeal?
Why his fits-and-starts theology,
his stop-and-go arrangements?
Can't he make up his mind?
Why the carrot?
Why the stick?
Why the evenings and mornings of those consecutive days?
Why only after first fashioning them
could he see that they were good?
Why, having landscaped an even Eden,
having leached and prepared the pious, precious soils, having
his fell swoop harvest and sweet successful bumper crops,
did he need the farmer and plant the man, set him upright,
a scarecrow essence in the holy field?
Why first an Adam and then an Eve,
or Eve at all, or if and Eve, why
torn from that depleted man who, image
of his maker at once removed removes again
to blur the reciprocities in that deserving girl?
Why a serpent?
Why a tree?
Why fine print at all so near the start of things?
Why codicils and conditions, all that lawyerly qualm?
Why strings?
Why that Miranda decision hocus mumbo jumbo pocus,
reading rights to a man and a woman who not only do not
know that they are already in trouble
but do not even know what trouble is?
And ain't exile cruel and unusual punishment
when there's no place to go?
Of course they fell.
Who wouldn't fall in such a place?
Who wouldn't fall where the gravity was
1,002 in just the shade?
Who wouldn't fall when the thickest crop in that garden
was just gravity?
Flanoy had come out of his sulk.
He smiled, but Mother Mary would not look at him.
Adam and Eve on the rock pile now, the chain gang,
working off their offense and raising
kids, extra hands, till it was all cultivated now,
if not a peaceable kingdom then at least the trained one,
the old indebtedness paid up like mortgage.
And then a flood.
A flood.
The whole Earth disaster area.
The spoiled corn and wetted wheat,
the fruit and flooded fields all mashed and only
Father Noah's Ark afloat and all that liquorish
sea, sailing the farms, cruising the ruined hectares, vests
and acreage.
And Noah unclear, everyone unclear,
about the nature of the charges this time.
The actual straw that broke the actual camel's
back unspecified.
Yes, Flanoy thought, with me, too, and moved closer to Quiz.
And then the covenant again, the old instrument
which, by this time, even man knew
was the only way God ever did business,
never just by handshake let alone
by the binding, even honored, nod or raised finger or tickled
ear, which perhaps only the auctioneer ever sees
and which, nevertheless, always seems to be good enough even
for him, but a contract, a compact,
something a little more official than trust and less flimsy
than faith, yet not an actual agreement at all.
And even the single, simple seeming layman's conditions
behave, play nice, be good, and down-home language
a pitch beyond understanding.
Reprieved from oceans.
Starting over.
Breaking clean.
Almost sophisticated now.
Almost used to it, a kind of emigre,
Ellis Islanded, the culture not so shocking,
for all were greenhorns.
Greenhorns everywhere.
And you'd think that maybe the ironic point
of all this vagabondage was just to keep folks busy,
hold them still.
Shima Yisroel Adonoi Elohenu, Adonoi Echod, Joseph prayed.
He pounded his breast with the hand that had just been resting
in Mary's.
He looks like someone driving nails, Christ thought.
A tinker God, you'd think, someone editorial,
nuts for amendment, or even God all.
Do you suppose, with his second and third chances,
his governor's fond delight in commutation, reprieve?
A father indeed, a daddy, a pop, who counts to three perhaps
and gets passed two and goes to fractions--
2 and 1/2, 2 and 3/4, 4/5.
Fond of mountains, a thing for heights.
Ararat, Sinai.
Who ever delighted in the nature he
had made, crouching perhaps, making frames of his hands,
scouting location like a director, his shingle hung
in garden, ocean, wilderness, and the higher elevations,
a sort of majestic Fop posed in postcard
and practicing his law only where there was a view, never
on just ordinary earth.
Another covenant, this time in writing.
Elegant, he may have thought.
Elegant, I may have thought.
Powerful but elegant.
And showed my man something in a stone tablet,
who worked always in his chosen medium-- earth, water, fire.
Moses on the mountain would be air.
The terms terminal, 1 through 10, was God again.
Now he could get past three, dealing always,
note, with leaders, as he had dealt
with points of interest, oblique angle, off-center prospect,
steep vision like a goat's purchase.
His summit conferees, the elect of Earth,
its leading men, God's chosen persons, ho ho ho.
And Moses not two minutes at sea level,
but the people he had never deigned to deal with directly
were at it again, doing the golden calf like a new dance.
And Moses outraged as God at their loose talk
and their sweet tooth for leeks and garlic,
Egypt's spectacular shade.
But what did he do?
Nothing.
As always.
Nothing.
Who made the world in six days and flooded it in 40
but couldn't count to three.
Wait.
Nothing.
Unless you count a covenant.
I'll give you Christ, as if to say.
Just pledge belief.
Being good was hard.
Forget it.
Just pledge belief.
Believe.
Most of them were praying now.
Even Mary had lowered her head, as Joseph had,
though he had ceased to sway, whose strident
orthodoxy had bleached to something almost Episcopal,
who stood bare headed, his yarlmulke
fallen, and in phylacteries undone as laces.
So, God said, what do you make of me, eh?
What do you make of me now you understand that finally it
takes two to break a contract as well as to make one?
What do you make of me who could have gotten it
all right the first time, saved everyone trouble
and left Hell unstocked?
Do you love me?
Do you forgive and forget as easily as I do?
Do you?
Mother Mary peeked at the fluted piping
of his Nimbus, the sacred, secret rim,
like icing on pastry, where the helix tucked
into his golden head.
She held her belly in her hands and hoped
that this one would be a girl.
Do you?
Yes, they cried.
Yes.
Why do I do it then?
Why?
So we might choose, said one of the saved.
What?
Speak up.
So we might choose.
Never, God thundered.
What do I care if you choose?
Goodness, a saint shouted.
You get off on goodness.
On goodness?
Me?
God laughed.
On goodness?
Is that what you think?
Were you born yesterday?
You've been in the world.
Is that how you explain trial and error, history
by increment, God's long Slap and Tickle, his Indian-gift
wrath?
Goodness?
No.
It was art.
It was always art.
I work by the contrasts and metrics,
by beats and the silences.
It was all art because it makes a better story is why.
Christ held up his damaged hands.
It makes a better story?
He was furious.
Because it makes a better story?
Is this true?
Is it?
Sure it's true, God said.
Then, pausing, he saw Quiz hold back a yawn.
Teen hundredths, he said, 19/100, 20/100.
All right, that's it.
Kairos.
Doomsday.
Lesefario, in Hell, did not know at first
that he had stopped burning.
He thought pain's absence some new pain,
something eye of the hurricane or the heavy peace
before the firing squad takes aim.
He shook himself.
He seemed like the scabbed and crusted others,
like an animal, a bear perhaps after winter's long somnolence.
Instinct, memory did not work that fast.
It needed its bearings and landmarks.
It required its surveyors' grapples,
some alphabet of location.
How long?
How long did it take, asked the fellow who'd told him
his counting was a fad.
What how long?
Death.
How long did it take?
I stopped counting, he said.
Shame, the man said.
Yeah, said Lesefario, his heart breaking.
Bodies rose the surface of the seas and began swimming.
They were released from faded, colorless
flags, stove ships, hidden pilings where
they had snagged for years.
They came up out of shoals and split sandbars.
The drowned and murdered floated up
from the bottom of lakes, their faces
and bodies in the same dishabille
in which they had died.
They seeped out of riverbanks.
They surfaced in wells.
A rising tide of the dead.
In woods and rainforests, they quickened.
Corpses lost years.
They came to in deserts.
They waked up on mountains, a treasury of jigsaw death.
One could not have suspected their numbers,
that so many random had fallen.
These were merely the discards, the old boot dead, stochastic
as beer can, deposit bottle.
They woke up in battlefields.
They gathered themselves where they had exploded.
They got up in hospitals, their deaths not yet discovered.
They still wore identification bracelets.
IVs dangled from their wrists like slack banderillas.
They woke up in archeology, cities done in by earthquake,
fire, and time.
They climbed out of caves, out of canyons, geology.
Up out of mine shafts they came, comrades in cave-ins.
They worked their way through holes
they had melted in glaciers.
All Earth gave up its dead.
They strained against coffin lids, against vaults,
against sealers.
Stymied as escape artists, they banged encumbrance.
They swarmed.
They popped through, the hatched, frantic chicks
of death.
A man named Ladlehaus climbed out of his grave like someone
backing out of a window.
Like elopers, they left their burials.
They touched their tombs and niches
as if they were the old rooms of childhood, brushing them
lightly as if they were dusting.
They scrutinized their plots and read their markers
like people hunting addresses.
They loitered in their graveyards
as if they were keeping appointments.
Already they missed their deaths.
There were complaints.
They were cold in just sunlight after the heat of Hell.
Those who had donated organs had lost them forever.
They could feel the cavities and hollows, the terrible gouged
and amputate absentness.
The woman who had given her eyes away stirred her fingers
in the holes.
So grotesque, she moaned.
So grotesque.
Death grotesque is life.
All, all grotesque.
They came down from churchyards on hillsides
and in from cemeteries on the outskirts of town.
They bestirred themselves in the celebrated tombs and sepulchers
of the big-shot dead.
Their bodies shone with gore like wet paint.
They sooted the world as if it were carpet.
The living and dead were thrown together.
And the dead looked away first.
Tribes covered the Earth now.
Families did-- clans, races.
Mary, squeamish in the press of population,
could not bear the stench and thought.
It's morning sickness.
Joseph couldn't get over how much things had changed.
And Christ flinched whenever he saw soldiers.
Quiz, looking for sanctuary, pulled Flanoy into a YMCA.
Into the Valley of Jehoshaphat they
came and along all the coasts of Palestine.
They covered the ranges of Samaria and Judea,
of Abilene and Gilead, and stood in the Plains of Jezreel
and Sharon and spread out by Kinnereth's Sea
and the salted waters between Idumea and Moab--
and were a million deep all about the tough shores
of the ruined Mediterranean circle.
They seemed a kind of vegetation, their burnt skin
a smear of sullen growth.
Pressed together, Coney Islanded, Woodstocked,
Tivoli Gardened, Jonestowned.
They seemed spectators at some gameless stadium, vast
as the world.
They waited.
They did not know what was going to happen.
They consulted the religious among them.
But they didn't know either.
Then God was there.
And strangely, all could see him.
There was not a bad seat in the house.
It was short and sweet.
Because I never found my audience, God said.
Because I never found my audience.
He looked at the assembled dead, at the living billions
anxious at ground zero.
You gave me, some of you, your oohs and ahs,
the Jew's hooray and Catholic's Latin deference--
all theology's pious wow.
But I never found my audience.
He looked at Mary, who had feared
him, victim to his blue ribbon force, distrustful still,
savoring the ordinary who had been taken out of all that.
I never found my audience.
What had you, he asked his audience, to complain of?
You had the respect of peers.
You had peers.
He looked at Jesus.
You were no audience.
You had all the advantages and were only God's clone.
And at Joseph, you were a carpenter, he said.
You did things with your hands.
Why didn't you admire me more?
And at the damned, I gave you pain.
Do you appreciate the miracle--
to make it up out of thin air, deep, freefall
space, the gifted, driven atoms of remonstrance?
Trickier than orange juice or the taste of Brie.
Because I never found my audience,
said God and annihilated, as Mother Mary and Christ
and Lesefario and Joseph and Flanoy and Quiz
and their YMCA sea-front room in Piraeus
and all Hell's troubled sighed, everything.
Thanks.
[APPLAUSE]