Nathaniel Lucas: ‘Ekphrasis’ and ‘Oxytocin’

Ekphrasis on a Possible Joke (Church-going)

The congregation’s mostly sixty-ish
solitary women, Indians
and a few retarded street blow-ins
who say the words out of time
and smell of the early church.

Wifely deacons jerk the censer,
the sextet choir chants the hymns
Bach, who wrote his works
like the Bible, as training pieces,
appears from the organ, the only
ontological proof around here.

And the biddies whisper
who’s the young man? Why’s he here?
And sermons on the death of Diana
“we all remember where we were …”
I don’t, no matter.

Here’s the choice: the church
or pleasant nothing, a wheat grain’s life,
a wheat grain perhaps with wings, rudder
but there comes the time when I kneel,
bow my head, close my eyes
rest my elbows on the pew in front
and try to pray but get to thinking
of the medieval mural above the altar:
a pair of shins and sandalled feet,
missing a nail, protruding
nasally from fresco clouds
above a throng of former disbelievers.
No Sunday paper…