Apocalypse on the one hand; on the other
a job to do: routine, the work for which
they had been trained. Behind the barricades
and bullhorns, men of ordinary lives.
The day or shift, the wait for war, having ended
they touch their cars as if the cars were horses;
speak, more bitterly each day as days
continue and the dead drift further.
Opening the doors, they rub their necks and shrug,
they start their cars and separate to homes,
to wives and children, meals and television.
Some of them help with the dishes, help
with storybooks and baths, the children slippery
and squealing—everyone knows there is nothing like
the faces of children, not on God’s green
earth—
and after the bath, how cool and sweet their hair.
I wait out my hours, too, at work.
With one last look around the parking lot
and a look at the evening sky I start my car,
drive home to all this world can offer,
and I sleep, most nights, not badly—only sometimes
in the deep hours awake too long I rise
and walk the house: too much caffeine, I say,
that’s all, no difficulty here—no song
of looming angels, no sun of righteousness
around the corner of the dawn, no stellar
gravity dragging me out into free fall, out
into at least a perfect lack of power
over myself or anything at all.
Vernon Howell was a criminal—or else
or also David Koresh, one of those
who will have God, and a dozen wives as well.
I imagine in his mind a fire, always
this fire, a scripture white and scorching, too simple
and too large to live with, words upon
its involutions never still or silent,
never the same and never meant for him
but worrying his reason and his dreams,
a tangled thread to thick fingers, his mind
at last imposing petty order like
a knife blow on the life of God: to make
God yield, or make himself as large,
as large as the great flame. I want to know
if the men who drove the tanks saw God in fire;
if you, in the bones and ashes of these children,
see the plain and little life and know
how much it matters, David, after all?
Light On Dark Water 