The Fish No One Knows How to Eat

not a Christian, probably never was one, I don't think of Jesus much at all 
except when my eyes graze an image or crucifix, which always depicts 
a hoax Jesus that could not have existed, mistakenly Aryan-visaged 
for a middle-easterner


but if I do think of him, putting aside the question--man or son-of-god
or god partitioned into man or "son of man" as he called himself--
I imagine him on a isolated beach of average brown sand, no one else 
around, the corner of his robes--how silly


to accept the dogma that he wore robes--caught by a breeze, his long 
hair caught by the same as if the wind could not help but reach out 
and touch him tentatively the way it is allowed to touch flowers and 
with that gaze so benevolent


it burns right through me to the horizon fixing on something 
none of us can see, perhaps a boat bobbing in a storm, perhaps
lightning licking an unruly wave perhaps a wheel within 
a turning wheel. I wonder what he is thinking


of as he walks and why it is that he must be alone in a deserted
place and not Main Street Hong Kong or New York carrying 
a lantern between us and all our guns and money, throwing 
open the doors of our 100-story


temples where we tremble and pretend to speak in tongues. 
but no, he goes where no one is looking, arrives without 
a bus ticket or notice, invisible as a homeless man, carrying the basket 
of fish that no one knows how to eat.


he looks out at the sea. the sun contemplates setting but waits. 
there is always something lonely about him and I am not afraid
to say so. I have never seen him sit down or get to where it is
he is going and wonder


if he would exist at all without those worn sandals, the way
we could not exist without heartbeats. we rarely notice
our heartbeats, by-the-way, which go on ticking and ticking
until they don't. it's a fact: listening, turning


your entire being into an ear isn't easy unless the desolation
has filled you like a sail and the shore has been swept by the great
broom into undecipherable patterns that ask but refuse to
tell. perhaps that is why I see him only


there, among the sand like powdered bone and the tired voices of gulls
where, maybe, the temporary tide of my heart sounds surprising as the
breach of a whale, and like him I wonder the whole question 
what in this wide earth the heart is here for.