Читать книгу Love's Last Number - Christopher Howell - Страница 11

CROSSING JORDAN

Having eaten the chickens, dogs, cattle, horses, our belts,

leather vests, and shoes, we came at last to the river,

great silver-blue spillage carving its monument and grave

in the endless grass.

We fell face down and drank, a writhing stillness

filling us like lust

or the sort of prayer they don’t

teach you.

Leaves revolved on the stream like golden boats, carelessly adrift,

open to the sky that seemed to be watching as we herded small fish

into the shallows and ate them alive

and squirming.

Later we made fire in the shadow of a cutbank

and slept and rose and ate and drank again and slept

and on the third day

we rose

as our Lord, to whom we had prayed all the way from St. Joe

and who had indeed delivered us

so that we thought the far shore surely must flow with milk

and something sweet.

So we made our crossing, the stream being wide but shallow.

Only one nine-year-old boy broke the human chain and so

was swept away.

Brother Jacoby said it was what God and the river required

by way of sacrifice, and the boy’s father went for him with a knife.

Thus discord came upon us and a taint

upon the new land

so that some of us longed for our lives as they had been

before we dared to cross the glinting vein, before

we dared the Lord to give us

everything.

But, finally, with the river at our backs it seemed wrong

to think of this.

Praise the Lord and his angels, we said, when we buried the torn

and bloated boy,

who had reached down with both hands for something bright

in the water.