Mystery

           
Remember your mystery,
O my soul,
the toxic swamps,
your dirty hands,
their splintered nails,
cankerous warts on scaled skin,
shoeless feet below torn clothes,
mucus bloody-webbed
encrusted toes,
your heart an adder’s egg,
leathery, alive, unburst,
and always the distant
baying of pursuing hounds
with lusty thirst,
the law, its focused swords
untempered intent---
yes, someone knows
where you’ve been,
what you’ve done,
where you went.

A hopeless case,
yet a carpenter homeless,
a penniless Jew,
took your place,
down river in his coffin you escaped,
instead, pursuing law buried its hungry sword
with all the justified anger of God
in his offered side.

In your place he died,
but death could not hold such power and love,
at the beach where you stranded
was he waiting with fish and fire,
burst open your wooden tomb,
at supper your life began again,
as his:
your redeemer, brother, mystery friend.