I had only a tack hammer, an ice pick, faith,
and His command to me in an unknown tongue.
The Creation began with less. I wrapped sandwiches,
filled a Coke bottle with water, went into the desert.
Five days later at Cathedral Canyon
I ate my last dried liverwurst and waited
in the five o’clock furnace. The News would be on the air
from another Time Zone, a propitious hour
for all vibrations. Hell’s own heat beat me,
but He sent the shadow of the western cliff.
I turned to praise Him, striking rock with my bottle,
and water flowed from it. The desert did not bloom
but a last ray blazed a point on the eastern rim
where all else was the twilight of desolation,
and the voice one hears at will when he wills it enough
said, “Raise ye here an altar unto Me.”
“With an ice-pick, a tack hammer, and no water!”
I editorialized from Original Sin.
A shadow passed over my soul. “Delete!” I cried.
“Make read: by faith alone shall ye move mountains!”
The Jeep found me under a wheel of buzzards.
So I was told. I remember some presence descending.
But the telling was fractured. Words and no understanding.
A survey plane from the National Park Service
had spotted a tower of marble burning white
on Black Rock Mesa, circled close with glasses,
seen what appeared to be enormous inscriptions
in an unknown language. The University
had, at a guess, sent out an Aztec specialist.
He had taken photos and rock chips, measured and mapped.
He understood nothing. But Schlitz flowed from him
and Kraft’s Provolone and Wonder Bread. The Lord
prepared a table before me with Goulden’s Mustard
but gave no comfort to the unbeliever.
“God knows what it is,” said the Aztec. Even then
the truth on his lips-he could not hear and know it.
“Have ye asked of the godly?” I telepathized
when I had bloomed again. He answered aloud:
“At a State University?” It was so at Babel.
“Is there no seer among you?” I beamed again.
“Not within my discipline,” said the Aztec.
“We’ll know what it is when we get it on instruments.”
“Oh ye of little faith,” I beamed a last time,
“how then have ye heard voices when none has spoken?”
“When none has … !” said the Aztec. And stopped, refuted.
Then spoke into his radio, and it spoke
revealing itself in the tongues of the turned air, saying,
“John, John, thy labors are over. Come rest in Me.’
And I came from the desert having heard my name,
and was met, and led to this rest, and am feasted.
They bring me Spam and I eat, and that is His body;
and Kool-Aid and I drink, and that is His blood.
At night the tube goes black, but I find the clicker
here in my hand, and I need only choose.
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