Four plates of raw
iron, folded over one
   another, could not, they saw,

We all have seen it.
In the slide show he gives each summer.
There he is! (or There you are!) someone will say

Although the land itself is rolling and pitted,
the pole tips form a horizontal plane
flat enough to support a sheet of glass.

Red bones, golden bones,
reduced bones.
Bones spark. Gray shards

You who waited here before me
in silence mothers of silence
I always knew you were present

The way of free things unmatched she moved
expert of love but love more subtly tuned
than a watcher would expect from naive distance

Whatever prince commissioned this fancy faucet
was sick of Luther and Melanchthon and austere Calvin,
the relentless pressure of salvation-by-faith-not-works,

Fish are swimming at ease—
         this is the happiness of fish.
                  But the sage kings are dead

Crossing the land in a train, I passed through
the borderless townlets of sprawled New York
rising red brick out of nothing after

I've heard the Resurrection never was,
that Christ was never buried, never rose—
(a caveat prescribed by Roman laws).