Signs and natural wonders commingled familiarly.
Words on screens translated from words on paper
Translated from words on vellum translated
From parchment scrolls translated from clay
Sauntered and sashayed through the thoughts of the day,
The immediately recent, typically southern Utah day,
Where the eroding sand smelled damp by the pond
Dammed up and brown, surrounded by its fringe
Of cottonwoods at the receding spring shore,
Ridges of juniper-piñon receding away,
Last year’s leaves fluttering like small creatures
On the ground, so light and silvery grey, they seemed
Like litter reflecting the sun, like lizards when they skittered.
An actual lizard skittered. A raven announced
And was answered repeatedly by a put-upon scrub jay.
A jet dragged a contrail and its subsequent grumble overhead.
A cigarette butt, a skein of discarded paper wrapper,
A piece of glass emerged from the sand as actual
Litter. Nothing much. Sit close enough to the margins
And you could listen to the little riplet waves the breezes made.
Poor Saint Jerome, irascible fanatic, one of the best
Figures to symbolize his transitional age, one of the last
Romans to start out pagan, to receive a classical education.
He dragged his library into the desert. He tortured himself.
He tortured the women who believed in his vision
Of virginity, celibacy, suffering, starvation. He learned
Arabic and Syriac, Hebrew from actual Jews.
He translated frantically, too fast, too polemically.
Eventually a mob of other angry Christians
Burned even his library, as they burned down so many.
He died blindly working on one last commentary.
Along the way, early on, he had a fever dream
That Jesus was actually beating him for preferring
Pagan literature to the reading of translated scriptures,
For being a Ciceronian. He vowed never to read
The old Romans again. Later, he made excuses,
Used the Deuteronomist no less, to make them, and read.
Mostly he made contentious, scholarly, biased translations
That shaped the world to come for centuries, a millennium,
His idiosyncratic translations of texts ancient in his day, made
From parchment made from papyrus and sheepskin translations
Of impressions made in damp and then baked-hard clay.
By the little pond in the desert scrub when the breezes played
His signs, translated and translated again, into a language
Nonexistent in his day, through a medium nonexistent
In his day, continued to beat him down among the wonders
Of this part of the world he would never have guessed,
Part never mentioned by his Jesus, although settled
By those whose Jesus they believed came by here once,
To a far-off, unholy, Christless, ordinary day.
A long, black bird floated down to the actual lake.
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