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 would publish this cartoon.
Yet it was,
above the altar as throngs
of disbelievers worked to ease
their disbelief. My medieval
minders would have seen the joke
in this labour of centuries.
And what can love that moves the sun
not move? Do not look at the sun
you might find the ends of love
behind the constellations
and know that there were never
any constellations, just suns
requiring love to move.
Better not look closely at love,
you might find the sun moves still.

Nathaniel Lucas

Oxytocin

She sat down on him near the fire,
“Just a pleasant exchange of oxytocin,”
she said innocently. Guess he’s just a friend.
The clay-mation war begins, just like the Greeks
said, count no man happy until he’s dead.
Sex-magnet theory holds that poles attract
we’re past all that though old procedures
still work, like Hippocrates’ heart surgery.
And who doesn’t need it? Pray for the unloved,
yes the ugly too, and lipidinous and malformed
lovers with one polarity that repels. I tell you, pray.
Neuroscience vanquished the novel
or will soon and politics, hormones take the rest.
What will remain of us is oxytocin,
gorgeous line of graveyard palimpsest.
“Take your shirt off, I want to feel skin on skin,”
she said, “give me that sweet sweet oxytocin.”
I wish us all gentle dreams only of what is known.

Nathaniel Lucas