Читать книгу Pilgrim’s Gait - David Craig - Страница 6

—Garabandal

1.

San Vicente de la Barquera: boat beached

in mid-river sand—the Catholic in Europe!

Not everything-in-its-Puritan-place;

but the thing, skewed, as place.

Garabandal grows out of the Cantabrians,

buildings squatting in irregular red stone, mortar—

though everyone we met was from somewhere else.

I felt like the Beach Boys, waiting for a wave:

“the moment of conscience,” with a woman

someone knew who’d married a brother

of one of the visionaries!

(It was labor intensive,

this waiting for God!)

I got to stand—the pillar said—where St. Michael

had stood! And later, as we prayed our rosaries

beneath the pines, hoping for the three o’clock

change: strange swirls of low grey clouds appeared,

God finger-painting, moving them

under higher slate; a whole new world

seemed in the offing.

(Jude, for his three year old Downs’ part,

chimed in with comedic “alleluias.”)

The appointed hour: nothing happened!

Nothing.

Wrong year.

2.

Many of those pilgrims dead now: sunny Erla,

wigged switch board operator—cancer;

a too-needy Frank, on his crutches; both with what

Fr. Peter had labeled “real problems.”

And he was almost right. Jude is life-raft,

yes. Who’s ever been happier just to run,

as awkward as time, though his pain

is real enough, seventeen years later:

never finding a face to suit his classmates,

or a girlfriend, or a talent in life.

I caught a soccer game, passing a bar:

their Monday Night football; and huge,

beautiful statues, two over-sized religious stores;

our theologian and his family

seeming to go to confession every hour

as the time neared.

I ran into Fr. Scadron—ex-Parisian

artist, Jew—the priest my wife

had just edited a book for.

(I wondered if he were real!)

The locals were used to it, the us of things:

one Garabandal woman, hanging laundry

as Jude played with her boy’s trucks in the dust,

me sitting on a nearby stone

next to an older Dutch guy, a man who knew

the minutiae of every apparition

everywhere—trying to situate himself

in the infinite know.

It was all anti-climax, which was only right—

because our lives are precisely that.

Each one brought Jesus with him to get there,

shared Him along the way. And though I know

Jude, seventeen years later, would still like

to be healed—to have a life like other people,

what could any of us, finally, have traded

for what we’d been given?