Sunday poetry

Raymond

Jesus comes back like he said he would: a stand-up kind of guy,
reticent to a fault but rock solid.  The shy type everyone likes
but no one thinks much about one way or the other,
until one evening, during a storm, tooling down I-15
in his beat-up vw bug, he passes one of those awful
two-car wrecks &, pulling to the shoulder, hops out,
strolls past the paramedics & cops, & before they can
think to stop him, kneels into all that shattered glass
by the gurneys & sheets &, with a few incomprehensible words
in a language nobody's spoken in two thousand years,
coaxes the dead back to life.  The little kid
gets back his severed leg, & all that blood on the road
disappears like a bottle of trick ink.  Then everyone starts
waking up.  Even the drunk in the Chevy, sober
for once & looking sheepish as hell.  Thank God, he thinks,
no one was hurt.  Outraged, the cops wrestle Jesus
to the mud, snap on the cuffs, & toss him in the back
of their squad car.  But when they're done helping
the two ladies and the kid to their feet & walk back,
the cuffs are on the dashboard & their black K-9 Lab retriever
is curled in the guy's lap, Jesus scratching the fellow
behind the ears - something no one's thought to do
since he was a pup.  Listen, you know as well as I
that none of this is true, just a story I made up
about the world we would like to have been born into,
the world where nothing that we love has to die.
But the Lab retriever I was thinking of was real:
our beloved Raymond, who's been gone now many years,
though I can still see his black tail twitching happily
in his sleep as he'd lie at the foot of our bed, the way he used to.

~ Steve Kowit