Poetry
Exegesis
Elizabeth Langemak
Ours is a conversion story, all stories,
a parable as always: waiting in darkness
near unlit caves, we came bearing water,
bearing spices too good to season
or save: darkly that stone unrolled and both
of us, shyly, bet on the coming. Impossible
virgins and rumored whores, collectors
and payers of taxes unknown, ours
was always a laddering down, a climbing
to meet where the frame shook
its hardest. We confessed, lost
heads, each crossed the foot of the other
with tears and hair and the babe in your arms
was not suffered to me because we thought
better judgment. Of the stories we knew
most ended in haloes of fire, with lions
asleep on full bellies, a horse for each
damned direction and limb and those who rose
from death to new life more often than not
woke up alone. What, then, becomes
of a heart on its stake? Better ask what
comes next: the ladder holds. Horses spit
through the reins. And desire, its own
righteousness, makes of one basket
enough. Maybe there was no miracle,
but even the unreligious tell
stories: of how each restored sight
requires the blind, each laying of hands
an open sore, how for every wound
that gets sealed up, there is also left a scar.