1

Somewhere between a bird's nest and a solar system - whom did
the story use to fashion the crown of thorns, and did it prick
them?
     Whom did the story use for judgement?
                                          Whom for betrayal?

The slender silver filament of drool from too much Quaalude tethered
her chin to her shoulder.
                         When I came back she was sitting
on the couch, her hands turned up, her face turned away and down.

Every Annunciation is freaked with doom, flashed in crucifixion.

Because I left home she was allowed to keep pushing her face
through the windshields of collapsing automobiles, as if she
wanted to be born from a speeding car.
                                      All according to plan,
following the story in telling it.
                                  Pilate no more judges Christ
than he judges the air he breathes.
                                   He is nothing.
                                                 He washes
his hands according to plan, another symbol.
                                            It would be like
judging a cloud formation, the Grand Canyon, or an ant.
                                                      Like
washing less than nothing from your hands.

 
2

Its back was leaves that mimed the leaves in back of us, but
the chair was painted white - white as the snow that never
stopped falling in my ears.
                           The white leaves of the chair
that mocked the leaves of the backdrop, making us, for you,
the foredrop, imprinted leaf-prints on my bare back - white
ones.
     I held my gurgling sister in my lap, child whose cloud
I held as well, as the white wrought chair with its white leaves
sped us toward the sanctuary of damage.
                                       Can you, where you are
now, remember the garden chair I held her in for you?
                                                     We make
a crazy Pietà, my newborn sister and I.
                                       You step back.
                                                     In my
lap there rests a cloud of swaddling blankets like a shroud,
and on the cloud a laughing child.
                                  I squint and smile.
                                                     I'm round-
faced as a moon on a string, towheaded, slope-shouldered, vague
as a lamb and shorn like one.
                             The backdrop won't drop back
its ivied wall.

 
3

I was teaching my little sister how to fly when she broke her 
arm.
    I did.
           I lay back in the snow and put my galoshes against
her skinny butt and pushed her into the sky.
                                            Over and over up-
ward into the falling, and the fallen caught her, and her laughter
spilled.
        We got it wrong one time and that was it.
                                                 I said, "Now,
now."
     My mother's white station wagon disappeared into the snow
on its way to the white hospital, and the volume turned up.

Right now a spring snow falls and sublimes.
                                           The snowline retreats
upward like a rising hem of sky.
                                The snow is disappearing toward
me.