I.

Scene: Magdala, before the public ministry of light.

Lips, hips, tits, and thighs someone came up high

Upon this party of the sexes, and took upon your body

To eat. Brave lady, trestle of teat, gated goat-horn

Of flowers, fruit, and corn. A land of plenty,

You. Born of thick thighs, slouching towards a waiting,

Waiting, to be born. Brave lady, living in cold-dark space

In clotted creams and cherried tops, fingers carving circles

In you, tongues speaking lazily of your virtues, and you,

You listening. You are pulling ropes around you

Creating new shapes of your breasts, hips, and thighs.

You are curling women’s hair, you are asking yourself, care.

The fisherman weeps for his catch in this country

Of no rebels, rebelling. His mackerel-covered fingers

Closing themselves in prayer, sealing your two

Mouths shut.

II.

Scene: Mary Magdalene visits the imprisoned John the Baptist with Joanna, wife of Chusa.

There was once a covenant between science

And mystery, but one grew stronger. Now men

Relax their members until they bleed, and

Breed with strangers and call it being free.

I walk. I am with Joanna. We have come to hear

A man of strange adiposity speak but even

The locusts are baffled. He says he has honey

For us, the red kind. “The blaze is infinite,” he

Promises. This is the sinners’ last retreat before

Going home. There is a stridulation in his claws

As he reaches inside the bag. How you can tell he

Decided to become solitary after rubbing one

Part of his body against another too much. He is

Now in the wilderness that lives inside me, alone

Calling to me, to die, and I know it. There is

A kiln inside my stomach, ready to burn my vitals

For my sake, alone.

III.

Scene: The angels greeting to Magdalene as she is chained to the serpent Svarbhanu.

My brother Lazarus has died. The feeling is

Immense. Only moments before I was sealed

In a kiss with the world, my eyes pressed so

Close to the glass of it that neither of us could

See. This is the last of the miracles. Martha

Asks me to stand at the bier, but I am grateful

I am not there. Instead, I am outside watchful

Of the blackbirds, their paths of flight not

Self-determined, I now see, but driven by an

Unseen wind, which rises and spreads them

Apart. I would like to sail on them, those little

Black tombs of air, during a slow winter

At noon. The casket is closed. Martha still

Worries about the smell. In this moment,

If I were to choose between heaven and hell,

I would still choose the latter—my little philomel.

IV.

Scene: The exorcism of Magdalene at the supper table.

In the beginning there was light, fractured into three

Dividing itself like a mitosis without memory

Dividing itself, one, two, and three

Over the visages of the men at the bar who usually notice me.

I am back home. I once paid a surgeon a heavy fee

To retrace the lines around my face, to make the circles

Feel round once more. A sad compulsion drives me.

But I am not one troubled by cupid, nor one

Divested by a divine burden, but one in possession

Of a kind of inverse of vice. Let the Pharisees argue.

The crumbs from the table are falling over my hair

Like glittering nervous starlets, and for this I drop

To your knees. I am compelled by something I cannot

Touch, feel, or see. The heat moves me now. I feel

A covenant between us tonight. You come as two

Candles standing in prayer, iluminating the me

from the not me.

V.

Scene: Judas rebuked by Christ as Magdalene anoints the Lord’s feet with expensive ointment.

Anoint me of messages golden, pure, and glistening

Pouring down your brow. I bow to you. Head

Cocked forward, eyes downcast, furrowed face

Like a plowman’s gaze, lone and level, stretching far

Away. There, a moment: In that gold sufficed

Measure there is something I cannot bear alone

So we meet: sinner and sinned against; healer

And healed. I the carrier, and you, the revealed.

The union thereof we speak, useless now—not of flesh

and bone, but of hand and forehand, the mount of palm

Royal, Tyrian in its purple, violet in its violet, and soft just

Like that flower’s leaves, which disintegrate from time to time.

Time—my stock is fully in this. Yours, the shoreline

Receiving the beating of waves, retreating underneath

Itself to offer us redemption. The heart will always

proclaim “Treason,” and lose itself, every time.

VI.

Scene: Magdalene on the Via Dolorosa.

The women beside me crying, on grease-lined streets

The women beside me crying, as you are beat

They are fulfilling a promise. Their voices burst

Along those sight lines made most manifest by the Sun, by

Those tiny miracles which draw the differences between

A tiny bit of refuse, and the beggar’s tongue. Reverberate

Among the ears, signal to the white-throated king-fisher

Of the dark events about to draw near.

Beat the senses from me, Father. You are the aqueduct

Of fire searing through these visible throngs; drawing us

Closer to that green hill of frogs, moss, and locusts alike;

Where we can no longer tell if we are body, blood, or Christ.

VII.

Scene: Crucifixion.

If this were a drama that were told

And you had the script, and were taking notes

The margins full of failures

Of red marks of borrowed ink

Would you have participated?

“They’ll bury him soon.”

You were a man born from the womb

The streets made you a child

I am watching Him being lain across the beams.

One and two, the alabaster limbs split apart

There’s hearsay about who said what.

“They’ll bury him” they told me,

“But I pity him” I said—

Like a white heat

A blow to my ears

A blow to my heart

A blow to my feet

I could do nothing.

Wintering thrushes.

The chalice which my Father hath given me

Shall I not drink of it, too?

VIII.

Scene: Magdalene at the tomb.

White flashes of cloth, angel wing

Head to toe, He is gone.

The spectacle finished, the drama closed.

Was all of this a fiction which I tried to compose?

I came early, when it was dark

I saw the linen cloths lying

I stood without, weeping

I stood within, grieving.

He saith to me: Mary. Me turning to him: Rabboni.

“Why are you crying?”

I do not know.

I am shimmering and dumb, I am flittering and numb

Again, the heat draws me near.

Entire in all its dimensions is a power

Which can bring my body, and yours

Into focus.

IX.

Scene: Noli me tangere.

Woman, why weepest thou, whom do you seek?

His stance, almost athletic in its defense, for this

A time when gods no longer lie with mortals

When touch no longer a definite sense

But one of solitude, and bone. He asks me:

Woman, why weepest thou, whom are you seeking?

I no longer know. A recollection, maybe, a fabrication

Of my heart, and its assembly of your head, foot, and

Toe. Fingers are the thieves of touch, turning

Miracles into stone. Your breath announces your

Vicinities, while I stagger into this darkness, alone.

Woman, why weepest thou, whom is it you seek?

Back at these charred-out spaces, a former life

Now outlined in white-winged revelers flapping

Cap-a-pie, indifferent to our current situation.

Woman, why weepest thou; it is you we are seeking.

X.

Scene: The tongues of fire; Pentacost.

So this is what it’s to be cut from the root

From the pelvic-born sense, from those bone

Hewn hulls enclosing, quite enviously, my heart

            This is a sort of

Coming home, a circling of sound and sense

A freeing of locution from the prison of the mouth.

My confusion, coiling in on

Itself like a snake or the sun eating itself

And the son of its own making ad

Infinitum. I see now that God is not

Immune to us, but rather vulnerable to our

Serpentine speech, our cross-blooded veins.

Sometimes it is a fire that frees us, sometimes

A water. A vital tongue, a lick of flames, or a

Deluge cut loose from the belly of the sky

Like a ram rent for giving. That fear was

Where you left it, still by the door, inside. There is

A certain vernacular, a taxonomy of the heart 

Which the hawk knows, and the dove does not.

Tonight, I have the breath of ages running through me

Like a thousand doors blown open

By a persistent guest.

XI.

Scene: Magdalene at the court of the Emperor Tiberius, Caligula’s uncle.

This, the essential paradox. I’ve come to your court

To sell you nothing. That era of my life has passed.

I have come to buy you, to reveal what has already

Come to pass, and is passing. Tiberius, half-obscured

By the overhang of the limestone grotto, a lamb’s leg

hanging from his mouth, the grease still glistening

across his teeth. But I am an exiled hero, a fugitive pawn.

Exactly, this; this state of mind our God has primed

For our redemption, or so I have been told. Who is

Our God?  Odysseus stole our martyrs, selling lies

As you sell them now. The red comes. Tiberius’

Cheeks redden in line with that carmined object

Unisoned in heart, though not mind. The mind still

Looking out to sea, to the lolling, sparkled crests beyond

To his little-booted boy, that viper of all of our breast.

XII.

Scene: Magdalene lifted by angels.

My life a forfeiting of conclusions

A series of doors opened, then shut

Then opened again. My Prince, walking

These same sands, holding his own ending

Inside like a pregnancy, warm and

Hidden from sight—

The eyes get used to the disappearances

The tricks of the brain that tell us

That things are supposed to end, are

Supposed to have a circumference—

In this dark amphitheater of sense

In this dark desert of memory

The stars move along like shoals, like pilgrims

Walking towards their forgetting

And recalling again. I watch for them

Every day, at a certain hour

The angels come to lift me, head, arm

And foot, turning my ear to their song

Making me forget—

I am dropped back to earth

To remember, and do it again.

This is my penance for loving the

Seams of life too much, for making

A pact with the body, and its chronic

Swells and floods—

XIII.

Scene: Magdalene, the Penitent.

They call me “The Penitent”

This thing I birthed, a faceless child

Proffering me at night, so fearless

I considered it edible—

Consuming it, I thought, it would no longer vex me

This was when penance was a public act—

Which required, therefore, an audience

Instead, I sliced my head clear off

Stretched it long over my legs, so it could look upon

Its former position, always

Incidentally, this is the same way

Verbs become nouns

Marching towards their sepulchers

When no longer able to generate a pulse.

“Here lay the body of Mary.” So I am

Going “a-penancing”

Checking into hotel rooms, evading

The eyes of bell boys, the staff’s tongues

Hoping to catch my name

On a luggage tag.

XIV.

Scene: Magdalene, the Icon.

What do we know of sin? In the end, the only

difference in our negation is choice. When

You slid out from the sun, still-born and wet

A nakedness arrived. I placed you in my mouth

Like a warm pebble. At once you rushed in

Removing my heart and liver and tongue, hooking

Them through my nose, purging my lungs of all air

Making room for your breath.  A tulip bloomed.

Mine was an occulting light, dark for a short

Time, then revealing again. You called when

Firelight had lost its luster—when it could

No longer cut through the marrow 

Of our sea’s bones. Now I live in ant hills

Clothed in armies of lead, smearing honey

On pots and sensing seraphim by heat.

I preach how the sky—in its full glory—

would look different.