A Blasphemy

A Blasphemy

By Rodney Jones

A girl attacked me once with a number 2 Eagle pencil

for a whiny lisping impression of a radio preacher

she must have loved more than sophisticated or peace,

for she took the pencil in a whitened knuckle

and drove the point with all her weight behind it

through a thick pair of jeans, jogging it at the end

and twisting it, so the lead broke off under the skin,

an act undertaken so suddenly and dramatically

it was as though I had awakened in a strange hotel

with sirens going off and half-dressed women rushing

in every direction with kids tucked under their arms;

as though the Moslems had retaken Jerusalem for

the twelfth time, the crusaders were riding south,

and the Jews in Cadiz and Granada were packing

their bags, mapping the snowy ghettos of the north.

But where we were, it was still Tuscaloosa, late

summer, and the heat in her sparsely decorated room

We had come together after work was so miserable

and intense the wallpaper was crimping at each seam,

the posters of daisies and horses she had pasted up

were fallen all over the floor. Whatever I thought

would happen was not going to happen with any of the three billion women

of the world forever. This time it would take

for the first kindness was the wait for a Campbellite

to accept Darwin and Galileo or for all Arkansas

to embrace a black Messiah. The time it would take

for even a hand to shyly, unambiguously brush my own

was the years Bertrand Russel waited for humanism,

disarmament, and neutrality. And then she was

there, her cloth daubing at the darkly jellying wound.

In contrition, she bowed with tweezers to pick the grit.

With alcohol, she cleansed the rubbery petals.

She unspooled the white gauze and spread the balm of mercy.

Because she loved Christ, she forgave me. And what

was  that all about? I wondered, walking home,

through the familiar streets, and steeple of each church

raised like a beneficent weapon, the mark of the heretic

on my thigh, and mockery was still the unforgivable sin.

Nims, J.F. 1992. Western wind: an introduction to Poetry. New York: McGraw-Hill.