“Transport”, Canterbury Cathedral
Maude Larke
Maude Larke has come back to her own writing after working in the American, English, and French university systems, analyzing others’ texts and films. She has also returned to the classical music world as an ardent amateur after fifteen years of piano and voice in her youth. Winner of the 2011 PhatSalmon Poetry Prize and the 2012 Swale Life Poetry Competition, she has been published in Oberon, Naugatuck River Review, Cyclamens and Swords, Mslexia, Cliterature, and Short, Fast, and Deadly, among others.
It levitates
(like him?)
quite still
under vaults
over an erstwhile place
made more sacred
under tons
of cruciform dedication
properly oriented
to sunrise, sunset.
There is no attempt
to correspond
to our notions
of symmetry
in the angle
of flotation.
The figure itself
can be placed.
The nails
have multiplied
frighteningly
so many
and they point in.
How does
his presence
mark the absent Thomas?
How call him back?
How etch him out
below that hovering?
The link
is cobwebby
virtual
in that Thomas’s
blood is seen
as answering
to Jesus’s.
Both have dried.
One a red-written name
under three truncated
swords eaten
by their culpability.
The other still
painted, mosaicked,
embroidered,
remembered
obsessively
almost salaciously
but long since
left unpreserved.
Both are bodiless since.
Thomas shattered
by the brute violence
of his turning out –
démise du tombeau –
the burning of his bones
the vacating
of criminality
by criminality
Jesus (by legend)
left hanging
awaiting
a theoretical
and altogether vague
return.
Rebodied? Maybe not.
But here, now,
left a sketch
bloodless
fleshless
a mere
nerve network
suspended
like aspirin in water
and too immobile
for orbit.
The traditional sculptures –
mises en tombeau –
show the dead
(for now) Jesus
handled and half-lying
jutting
his nearest ones
surrounding
cradling
enshrouding.
This one shows him
shrouded
sealed
laid under the slab.
Alone.
He has yet to reach
to push the stone
to curl the fingers
over the lips
of that macabre basin.
And we cannot
trace a grimace
in that cocked-back
mesh of face.
Deimos eZine 