Nicodemus
by Miriam Pollard

I

What was the darkness made of,
What color was that night?
Was it clean,
Did it crunch underfoot,
And did cicadas chew its edges?
In what temper had the sun gone down?
Had day sagged off
Like a shop boy pulling down the blinds?
Or did it dance away in skirts and bangles,
A bride leaving her father's house?
O God, that night-
Was it cold and did it taste like fog?
Did it wrap me in its arms
Or push me into a street of eyeless houses?
It's gone, that night.
I remember only the voice.

II

A lamp is not the sun.
A dish of fire in the corner
plays a little with the dark,
rearranges the shadows.
It cannot make a day.
Shadows ate his elbows, sprawled across his knees
And smudged away his face.
Fingers of lamplight
Stitched a crown around his head.
It came and went.
I heard what I could not see,
I saw with my ears,
And was not happy with it.
"Born again? How can this be?" meant-
and he knew it-"I do not want it so."
An infant's naked flesh
did not appeal to me.
No more the windy sea.
Creation was, is, had been;
leave it alone.
Those who go down to the sea in ships
are young,
the unestablished, the uncreated.
Let them.
Who are you?
Who are you to demand such things,
To drop me into the sea's womb
And flay me with such a wind?
"Who are you?" crawled up my spine
and clamped its teeth around my neck.
Easy now to understand
Why I do not remember that night.
III
Later, I saw.
I saw the naked flesh soaked in the blood of birth,
Fly-covered under an unshadowed sun.
What wind there was-
such wind I had feared-
was no more than a breath
wheezed from between swollen lips.
And such a sea he rode:
a trickle of the heart's fluid
seeping down blackened ribs.
Rabbi, my brother, my priest, my child,
I have laid your blood upon the rock,
carried it on my hands.
I have carried you into the cave.
How gently one lays broken flesh upon its slab.
Rabbi, my friend,
I will follow you out to sea.
I will walk with you
a thousand darkened streets.
I will walk farther than that.
Who are you?
I will not ask again.
I am afraid I know.
And further will night instruct me.
And morning.

(from Theology Today, April 2003)

[Miriam Pollard is a member of the community of Santa Rita Abbey, 
located in the southwestern desert of Sonoita, Arizona. 
She is the author of Neither be Afraid and Other Poems (2000).]