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Board Administrator Username: mjm Post Number: 3266 Registered: 11-1998 |
Honorable Mention Cain and Abel Jim Doss As I step from the doorway he is there, mid-summer tan at the start of spring, hair and beard black as night in the trees. Like a specter he hovers by a trashcan showing me his chewed-off hands. Blood runs from the corners of his mouth. He does not know what is real and what is invented; if the stumps he waves at the many passersby have fingers, tendons, and bones, can grasp and reach, raise food to his mouth. And I do not know if he is real or imagined, or if he understands the harm he has inflicted on himself. In ignorance the voices descend upon him like crows to peck out his eyes, rip the question marks from his ears, sit on his shoulders screeching like nameless angels or daemons. His own voice cannot talk over them no matter how fast the incantations flow from his lips, how loudly his words rise to roost on rooftops to join the chorus that mocks him. I can’t see the shower of agony that descends to claw at his consciousness. I can’t lift the pain that covers his creation like a blood-stained rock. When did he cleave from me? From which rib was he formed with dust and spit? Did the same hand that made me make him? He is eating in the morning light, eating something that he has found, or part of himself or the landscape around him. I am supposed to watch his every move without looking away in revulsion. I am to absorb every detail in the cliff of his face, every expression that rises and falls in the back drafts, every hawk of emotion that soars to disappear. Inside this cathedral of air that separates us is a paradise we both inhabit like planets spinning around separate suns, each populated by their own civilizations. Not the paradise of the first man, but the last where we must again learn how to take comfort in one another. |
