I. Christ. But not as we know him. As his father knew him. As a child smeared with shit. As a crying infant with a voice so loud it cracks the skins of his starving parents. Christ tries to shove rocks too large to swallow into his mouth and his mother, a saint, stops him just in time. A Christ who is already dying, bleeding. A Christ who does not know anything, not one thing, except that palms and soles and ribs bleed. And this is our savior. And we weep.
II. This, he knows, is clear. A woman and her child sit beneath the clouds. She has just buried her husband and burned the ring, twigs, that they had used to mark their marriage. Perhaps she has killed him. Her child cries, and the woman’s face, beneath the ripple of clouds, is hopeful. They both feel hunger, like a storm, accumulating, darkening through their stomachs. The child remembers his womb, dreams of embryonic bliss, the floating like a thousand feathers. He remembers his thoughts beginning, still inside and safe, he remembers the break, the skin on fire, a world so bright it blinded, the changing of seasons, blight and crack and sizzle and he remembers it all, though he will forget. The woman still alive, having just buried her husband, who she may or may not have killed, who she may or may not have resented, who may or may not have fathered her son, who may or may not be the savior, who may or may not die and rise again, who may or may not have buried the body of god in her backyard, by the river, beneath a rising sun, who may or may not be responsible for all this freedom that writhes and bites within us. And she is, yes, beneath the cracking terra-cotta, we can see, smiling.
III. Psalmody. Notes perforate the flat stone surface. They prefigure the air. A chorus of small children sing. Angelaphonous music we can almost hear. Seraphim dot the sky. Three drunk musicians. An old voice like a cave. Glottal stops when singing. Singing.
IV. A child, no older than 12, pulls a key from a book on her mother’s bookshelf. The pages are so old and worn that they crumble and melt into dust in her palms as she turns them, the spine sifts, and a pile of dirt pools, like the eyes of scared children, at her feet. The key does not fit any hole in her house. We know from her smiles, and the pile of read books behind her that she will try every door, even the one to her room. It does not, even, open the chest in the rectory she sits on, feet dangled like long silver earnings over the wood floor, above the ground, where her father writes sermons for Sunday mass, occasionally pausing, looking at her until he smiles, struck, and turns back to his prayers. The key waits on a chain around her neck. Boys play with it, flirting, as she grows. She knows its shape, the copper against her sternum, a damascened heart beating against the rust. At night she wipes the green filament from her skin. She tries to open strangers’ doors, their cars, ATMs, prison cells, her grandmother’s mausoleum, the gates of heaven, the chains of Atlas, and finally Prometheus, who she cannot free, though she spares his liver for one day, spending a sleepless night shoeing vultures from his stomach, just scabbed over, a small girl despiting talon and feather. She kisses the saint of fire before she leaves. His whiskers prick her skin. She tries the key again, just to check, and it still fails so she leaves, and listens to Prometheus stifle his cries until he thinks she cannot hear him anymore. She returns to mundane locks, every safety deposit box in her bank, high school lockers, high rise apartment mailboxes. The artist does not know what, if anything, she unlocks. But we stare at the young girl until a woman touches our hand softly, and with febrile eyes burning pushes a rusted key through the skin and through the caesura between ribs and into our chest, and we are so happy for her, despite the pain. She nods and closes our chest, taking and leaving nothing. She exhales once, long, free. And before we know what is happening she runs. We chase her but we are confused and slow and we cannot catch her, not before she reaches a cliff that overlooks the ocean and throws the key. We cry as it sails and fall as it sinks. The fish swim through it, and algae encrust it as it settles into the sediment. We feel a loss so large we cannot, possibly, carry it, but we do, up against our chests, learning its metal longing like a language, like the inside of a mouth, like a mountain, like Zion, and it becomes a prayer, and we sing it, and God is happy for the music. At least we hope she is. And these are the icons. And this is the end.