by Zach Kincaid
I press my ear to the door and listen. I hear a conversation. It drifts in and out. At times there is nothing, just silence... and me – my own person – some purveyor who has bought into the trick and doesn’t know how it works. God, let’s not pretend. My perception of your whole story, from closing up the garden shop onward, falls onto stony paths most of the time.
Footsteps. It starts with footsteps and a frightened couple hiding, holding each other in the brush. The footsteps carry a voice – a call – “where are you?” And, someone reaches out and opens the bush like a refrigerator door. Throw them out. They’ve gone bad. They’ve spoiled on the very stuff that could’ve preserved them. Lock up the house. Camouflage the grounds. Be on your way – cursed, crushed, crawling with little guidance, and even less hope.
Wandering and want. The first couple drifts until Noah builds an ark and lands somewhere else. Granted, everyone dies except his family, but, it had to be. Right? A new world again. Look up. How high are those stars? Build, build, build. You Jenga that idea into confusion. Figure out the stars? No, first figure out who makes sense. Like fantasia’s wizard who can’t stop the mops from pouring water, a flood of words pours over the world and a new world is cast yet again.
Then there’s Abraham and you then help define those same stars. Look up. The future generations will be like their number. And into motion is set a whole course of showing your hand and hiding it. And hiding it. And hiding it.
“Here I am,” you say, behind the pillowing rock that supports Jacob. Look up. See the angels coming, going. Take it in the gut. Hit. And the hip. Limp. A new world hobbled into Egypt, into slavery, on the back of a jealous transaction. But dreams can float, and down through the Nile came another who saw a bush again. This time no one hid. This time prophecy spills down like the waterfall at Banias. You made red the river, the entryways, the hard hearts. And, behind a curtain of fire and across a mythical sea, a world begins again.
Why? Shining Moses sees you, but the nose dive into the earth’s core is the majority’s story. Wander. Wander again? Look up. I’m in the cloud. You’re throwing down food into my fishbowl. How do I get out? How do I know that’s you? I want to believe. At times you settle the dust. Take the hand of Elijah and come around the Broom Tree. No, don’t worry. It’s not that kind of tree. We’ll carve our names on it. I’ll whisper to you, encourage you, fill you until you’re bursting.
I might stretch to catch what will only kill me. Elijah couldn’t stay there. He moves on. You move out. Judge me; begrudge you. Poke my eyes out and maybe my pillars will fall in. I’ll wait. Exiled into a circus show of dry bones and spinning wheels, writing on walls and tearing them down only to exercise a reunion. No tower this time, just a crazy who calls himself Nehemiah, and a wall to get in and stay out, to keep and to exploit, to faintly remember the sash of Rahab’s faith and look with a squint to the hem of a bloody woman who hopes – who desperately hopes – that on that day a new world would begin…again.
Up a stony path, through the hedge, in a garden, I hear you. In it, no poison trees, no fruit to eat, no hiding place to wait out a walking god. I only see a weeping, broken man. Is that you? I only see new paths through dark woods. I could get lost. Nothing seems well-traveled here. If it were, more people would come by and… hold on. Cut in. Move close. The weeping man has something in his pocket. He reaches. His hand, unsteady, pulls out a dry fig. He offers it to me. Take this. Eat it.
Write me into your story. At times the stony path is only useful to hurl rocks into my valleys of doubt. But, I have mustard seeds to plant. I hear a feast is prepared, a table even in the midst of pilgrims like myself, who don’t know it all – the whys, hows, whens. I press my head against these doors and listen with a tingling anticipation that maybe here, maybe an altar is set here, a broom tree here, a weeping, broken man here. And maybe, just maybe, a walking God will ask again “where are you?” and I might give a better answer, not afraid of the limp I may develop from our encounter.