And the Jesus they saw
tangled into the highway`s spaghetti billboard.
And the Virgin Mary visible in a tree
in a park in the Bronx. Didn`t somebody see
the entirety of the sated and intently gazing guests
at His last supper—clearer than Leonardo
rendered—in the shrubbery edging a Little League lot?
In 1894, when Percival Lowell began to map
the lines (straight lines: canals!) that looked to him
like organized hydraulic systems
sectioning the Martian wastes,
he shaped a hundred years of scientific
and science-fictional thinking. Elvis:
in bunched-up drapery. Buddha: in a video’d cloud.
And Dorie needed to see (for “see,” insert “believe”)
that every day when Nestor left the house to make
the hillock of simoleons it would obviously take
for their Rolls Royces and vacations,
it was legal work, was work that didn`t require
a kind of flirting with worrisome danger.
I do it. You do it. The widower`s seen his wife
appear in stains below the garden hose`s spigot
dozens of loving times. Our fraught brains couldn`t
last for a year of the hammering blows each day is,
if they didn`t make these occasional shapes
from will and a frizzle of retinal fatigue.
I think of Mars and I think of Nestor….
It`s true that the older he got,
the more we could map the lines in his face,
and read them however we wanted.