The Savior in Gethsemane

He passed through the city’s gate and crossed a brook,

Catching a bramble at the torn hem of His robe;

A flower hung in His hand like stars in a lobe,

Trembling like a holy whisper in a quiet nook

Of the garden, or like the Spirit in a holy book.

For day was at an end. His sandal caught a stone;

It scurried into the ravine, sounding the dull

And stilling depths as He might among disciples cull

And answer questions where they stopped, day flown

And deepening into the fields and shadows of Apollyon.

“Sit here, while I go and pray,” He said, having felt

In them the trials of sleep hanging like lustre

In their eyes as under His, His words, in a cluster,

Lulled them while in the deepening night He dealt

With the imprimatur of death, the sorrow, where He knelt.

Opening Him to pain so secretly, the sills of hell

Trembled from its ecstasy, that Satan as creator

In the world could shimmer in them and as malefactor

Gnarl the will and light of God by keeping their shell

Of devotion murmuring “Rabboni” in a covert well

Of sleep. And so He asked Peter, as Peter slept,

“What, could you not watch with me this hour? I pray.”

Peter stirred himself awake, as if with memory to play

Against margents of the night in an overmastering debt

To Light, that he had forsaken wearily as Jesus wept. …

To feel rime of death and denial like a sea that lifts

From the breath of wind and floods inward, drowning

Flowers that wavered flute or birdsong, browning

And breaking them in that duration; denial that shifts

In the rills of nightfall where polyp Satan sifts

His prize, a piety: breathing the breath of lead,

Or seeing eyes and freight of bone crushed in,

Or hearing fast against a wall of silence, sin

The weight against the mind and heart, dead

As pride that hangs like pitchblende in His dread.

The twilight of that day eternally impends.

“Thy will, not mine,” and the glowing world weighs

Upon the Light, revolving in, as torment strays

Through Him that Satan is a dangling lure that wends

And stirs but must be taken in as it descends.

God rose to the call “Rabboni” as brandished fires

Veered among trees where they betrayed the face of him

Who felt the silver coins in the stirrup of a whim.

And so He repines as He is taken, and the pyres

Of heaven, burning low, wink out, as Night expires.