The Glorified Body
Barone, Patricia
Patricia Barone The Glorified Body I. "Though I'm old and sick/' said Uncle Ned, postincision, half his stomach gone, ''in God's eye, I'm just a baby/' He looks forward to his new body,...
...Feel me and see-a spirit doesn't have flesh and bones like mine...
...Will our souls, like yeast, fall on dough to multiply, a ferment, and this timeno kneading, no bearing down...
...An old man's death is far below frontiers-where pain is peaked so high it might reverse, as nerves are numbed, then sing: the newborn's head pressing on the pelvic bone, then out...
...We're slow...
...Does a tumor flower...
...When we rise, will our fingers from past lives leave shining prints, or will the new body erase memory: all our flesh-fine meetings...
...Can the dying learn to love their death...
...The disciples, mouths gaping, followed his every bite- broiled fish and raw honey...
...Patricia Barone The Glorified Body I. "Though I'm old and sick/' said Uncle Ned, postincision, half his stomach gone, ''in God's eye, I'm just a baby/' He looks forward to his new body, his second coming togethersuccessful, not like this dying from the inside out, ending in the rotten sweet smell of cancer, antimatter on the tibia, fibula, the lovely long bones' sockets cradle short bones and become just tent poles for the trying flesh: it multiplies beyond itself, beyond the adulf s blue temples, open-boned skull of the baby, scalp drawn tight like a drum, pulse beating...
...the liquid eye, held by membrane, so thin...
...Have you anything here to eat...
...A bloody show," they said, and then "it's crowning...
...Jesus came from death to ask for breakfast...
...Only an observer could think of pain as a tunnel...
...Here we meet, our skin on skin, but thenin the glorified body will we penetrate or linger in the crossing of colored lights: never dark or lonely in that white light where colors leech and edges too- we lose ourselves in God, become one body...
...There's something to show for childbirth, but what of this straining of the body out beyond the body...
...The curve of cheek into jaw, eyes gravely set among small orbital bonesall reassemble that last day we hope...
...Even the glorified body is not what we think...
...Put a finger in the dough, it leaves a mark, but the rising fills it in...
...He is impossible, he is a wave, a particle, his hands feed the fire, turn the fish...
...III...
...What sort of body is this...
...Not a ventriloquist's dummy for the soul, oh nohis body is his voice, music every cell, but his hands are as solid as the bread with its honeycombed holes...
...It's enough to make you sick of ecstasy, nostalgic for the birth-marked body which must be fed...
...He hurtles through space while he is still here with us...
...We used to think if we knew where we were we'd never know for sure how fast we're going...
Vol. 123 • March 1996 • No. 6
