Who Sees the Movement?

Who Sees the Movement?

(“When Jesus saw him lying there and learned that he had been in this condition for a long time, he asked him, ‘Do you want to get well?’” John 5:6)

Wait for the water, watch for the springs that
bubble angel’s breath to break the surface tension
of plural years immobile, of secluded days centered
in the circling crowd.

Watch for the ripples swept by angel’s wings
that begin adjacent and end detached. For all
the years of waiting,
a stronger paralysis, a force of fiction,
impels the inaction. Each added anticipation
lowers the hope that once brightened the
first morning on the bank.

A pool of confection, glass candy to cool the
perception that the wait is myth, the storied cures
are legend. And, though walking is out of the question,
a staff new as the old days in the sun, awaits the moment
the first query and longing is answered.

With a quiet descending so slowly that only the discerning notice,
once the final bird has sung, the breeze brightens, the water
glistens
with diamond reflections of wind and sun. Unseen,
the wings freshen the mediations of those placed
and left there to revive or die.

What does a paralytic do when the waters of healing beckon?
What movement will take the immobile improbable?
Who left a man who could never move an inch closer
than the place they propped him, dropped him like
a rock float to the other shore.

Who sees the movement within the motionless?
Who lifts the staff unused? Who asks the inevitable
with intention to answer? Who brings the waiting water
further upshore to the flood tide meandering wider
than it ever had before?