| Magi |
Magi
1
It was not their father's craft, for they put
away their fathers with the demons of
their cradles. Nor could they enter again
the body of their mother's son. Tattoos
of the hooked needle and horse hair
forever turned them away and inward
beyond their flesh, into the wickets an
designs of another world.
2
And even in a far country they served this god
whose unsearchable love chose them
for the greatest of suffering. Melchior,
Balthasar, and Gaspar. When we know them
they were already great in their magic,
since by no other means
could they recover the mysteries
of their former lives.
Still apprentice,
still unequal to the scorpion's poison,
to the taste and sting of lips, the
swollen wounds from bites on lips.
3
They loved magic since they loved god. This bursting
one, who of all gods, could be served only by jests and
suffering. For he keeps always just one secret
that when he takes he takes nothing he can see.
Magic was the only thing this god cherished
and lament was the only language it learned,
giving us death so we would look outside ourselves,
beyond the marbled floors of youth and screens.
God knew that this death was not real,
but he gave it all the charm of fable,
knowing we would follow with our blood
all story.
4
They followed strange gods because the sight
of apparitions confirmed
every magic they knew.
They knew He was every form and our form
His eyes, unable, like a child in a small box
to touch or read the letters sent and returned
from His rumored star kingdoms.
And every grief in their past prepared them
for this journey, by which, suddenly,
they entered our lives.
5
He had worked it out long before,
and it was not beyond His doing
now, to appear here as mother and child.
They knew His ways in Media. Called back
from South Arabia. Followed
His sign into Egypt. Nothing.
But there they saw the three
star tombs-the map of Osiris' belt. Heard in
that country the story of the holy family:
the death and toilfull resurrection of
Osiris, his affair with Isis;
satisfied, at least, He had been there
the day before.
The star was the first thing they saw
whose signal they decoded years before,
traveling in the vast reaches
of their own silences.
6
Gaspar was the first to see her and touch
the arm of the other. And though the sights and
smells of Egypt were still a jewel and story,
now there was only her. Two of them
had channels in their arms. She,
whom nobody else could see.
She, whose only vantag
was a newly opened space in her
of silence.
7
Turning now from the other's touch, Balthasar
watched with renewed attention. Not only for
what each woman shares as strength with god,
how they always moved in the same spaces,
there was something else. There, beneath the girl's
covered and down-turned head.
Now seeing the faint blue light in her eyes,
the divine frenzy they alone could see,
perfectly coiled, perfectly concealed
in the consciously restrained gestures
of Mary's newly entered reign.
And to this day it is she who appears
to us. Not the gentile youth.
8
They left because they knew god's secret,
because the center of events lay elsewhere.
The angel warned them of dangers
some from the stars, some from
the people of the country.
Already they could hear harpies
and the noise of foaming dogs. Spells
were intercepted in their camp, turned,
and released again. Some from the unborn,
whose cold, blue arms motioned above their tents.
Some from those they took to their bosoms
unturnable.
9
Deeply concealed within her father's house,
a girl motioned to Melchior, just now pushing
small hair between her legs. It is not clear
what happened. How could there be a challenge
from this quarter? It was not the gesture of arms.
He didn't think the arms ever moved.
None of these things were real.
Except for the stories we believe.
10
"You will meet many gods along the way,"
said the two, where the road divides and
steeply descends into their country. "Some
who put flesh and hunger onto images. Some
who tease out your flesh until nothing is left
but images".
"Life was never flesh, but always stories"
He stumbled on, deeper into this god's magic.
11
They came because the sight of these apparitions
confirmed every magic they knew. They had searched
the unseen structure of correspondences and
apparitions, of which the cruel and funerary
earth was only one of the many folds
within his garment,
holding us, and them, and the star.
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