Before an Old Painting of the Crucifixion

The Mission Carmel,

June 1960

I ponder how He died, despairing once.

I’ve heard the cry subside in vacant skies,

In clearings where no other was. Despair,

Which, in the vibrant wake of utterance,

Resides in desolate calm, preoccupies,

Though it is still. There is no solace there.

That calm inhabits wilderness, the sea,

And where no peace inheres but solitude;

Near death it most impends. It was for Him,

Absurd and public in His agony,

Inscrutably itself, nor misconstrued,

Nor metaphrased in art or pseudonym:

A vague contagion. Old, the mural fades . . .

Reminded of the fainter sea I scanned,

I recollect: How mute in constancy!

I could not leave the wall of palisades

Till cormorants returned my eyes on land.

The mural but implies eternity:

Not death, but silence after death is change.

Judean hills, the endless afternoon,

The farther groves and arbors seasonless

But fix the mind within the moment’s range.

Where evening would obscure our sorrow soon,

There shines too much a sterile loveliness.

No imprecisions of commingled shade,

No shimmering deceptions of the sun,

Herein no semblances remark the cold

Unhindered swell of time, for time is stayed.

The Passion wanes into oblivion,

And time and timelessness confuse, I’m told.

These centuries removed from either fact

Have lain upon the critical expanse

And been of little consequence. The void

Is calendared in stone; the human act,

Outrageous, is in vain. The hours advance

Like flecks of foam borne landward and destroyed.

from The Gourd Dancer, by N. Scott Momaday

New York: Harper & Row, 1976