Archivists of the following decades are nearly unanimous in their fascination with the half-charred manuscripts of the abbot of the monastery, one of the few and by some accounts the only in the region to have survived the events of that misbegotten century.
—Kenek Witowicz, A Revised Lineage of Western Religious Orders, 1517–2071 (Volume VII)
The theologians say this emptiness
Is a kind of passion, enthralling.
And, it’s true, many of us
Embrace it with sour avidity, a sort of relief.
A false consummation: We confuse
Effort with orientation, as we turn away
From the summit, our source, our Lord.
The noons that warm us fall on bitter earth.
For some, in these days even work in the garden
Becomes unbearable, the stink of life
In the soil a rebuke to a blanked-out heart.
In the cities there were at least
The distractions we craved. Even if unbearable, too,
We bore them, false crosses, with pride.
For one, there were her salted summer shoulders
Under streetlamps, for another his bone mouth
On ochre glass, lipped in red neon and smoke.
For another, the solitude of bookshops and waves.
Everywhere seas of thigh at syzygy, all shapes and colors.
Movies, too, and all the cacophonous cuisines
Proper in those days to the capitals of empire.
Friends and churches, oak and magnolia, squealing trains,
The body of Christ slumped in doorways,
Shaded blue and bloody beneath steel facades,
Hung on a powerful thirst. And that same relief.
All this—was it an ark, or a forbidden tower?
Did it truly exist? Were we there indeed
Or always elsewhere? Did our distraction save us?
Who can write the testimony of these times?
For my brothers there is other work to do.
Their eloquence is in the rising of bread,
The tending of sheep, and the distillation
Of an herbal liqueur famous to our native region.
But in days of depression we do not even drink
Our appointed measures for time of feasting
And every salt loses its savor.
Only the sheep can save us then,
For we will not let them suffer.
Then it feels a life of cheap reenactment.
Half-hearted metanoia and grooves stripped slick.
How many times can we turn back to Him, ashamed
And crossedeye from long nights binged on curses?
The Gospels give us our answer
And sometimes we believe them.
(One day, recorded in now-pulped pages,
Brother Thomas took up the salvage tractor,
Urging it to the far edge of our lands
And then further, as if seeking immolation
In the purpling West. His shocking act of will
Did not win far, as fuel is heavily rationed
And the beast rickety with mismatched joints.
Yet it both unsettled and inspired us.
Some saw a last grasp for transcendence,
Vital if improperly aimed. Thomas died
That winter, and it restored us to the Psalms.)
Still so slowly we have ripened
Like the ancient wheat we coax.
In inertia of endless empty evenings
We force ourselves to rise, thresh, bathe,
To say the Angelus at odd hours
And beg each other for absolution.
How did we avoid the worst of our sins, then?
We would like to say it was through some virtue,
Though here we cannot keep our faces straight.
In reality we were simply blocked
By forces we devote to misunderstand.
Feeling, for once, no desire for shoulder or thigh
Our crime not lust for the world
But despair over what it can no longer give us.
Where once we longed for it, now
We cannot even long to leave it.
Our old books and incantations
Do not agree on the penalties for such infractions,
Nor on the remedies,
Though we cling to them in the dusk
And long past the hour of the setting moon.