Man Hanging Upside Down
I never knew the body could bend so many ways…
—Melissa Roxas
Here is a man hanging upside down
from a makeshift cross.
No credible witness can seem to tell us
his name or where he comes from.
Let the record show,
he did lie in at least seven dozen bits,
until the local birds plucked his scraps
from the river. They carried first an elbow,
then a toe, then half a skull and so on,
piecing the body together again
incorrectly: left arm for right,
an eye for a thumb, a moonlight for knees,
until he hung again from the cross
he was nailed to in the first place
at the intersection of Jordan and Faith,
and truth be told, few of us notice
how often those ragtag blackbirds
have come to squawk at every window in town.
Who is to say if this man hanging upside down
was corrupt or loved, only that some birds
set themselves in the middle of the night
to the aerial miracle of silt made flesh,
a crew of winged scoundrels, some half-mute, half-blind,
that plucked a body’s remnants from muddy banks
and at the crossroads of Faith and Truth Be Told
reassembled the figure of a man
who must surely ache, the way he strains to turn
his gaze away from so many nations at once.
Recent Comments