Deconstruction

Deconstruction

(“I will create new heavens and a new earth. The things that have happened before will not be remembered.  They will not even enter your minds.” Isaiah 65:17)

His heart had been demolished while he
thought he was building a life.
Each belief was a brick in elegant courses around
a courtyard of worship and labyrinths.

He walked in knowledge, he spoke with power,
his words came easy, actions harder than dried mud.
He was water, he was pliant, he was weeping and he was
silent
too many times when he knew the truth had been
left unspoken.

But his heart imploded after the high-rise was vacant
leaving him useless for the corporation’s intentions.
It leaned across the expressway waiting for the wrecking ball
to finish the job before anyone else got hurt.

Though he bled onto the pages, and said he still believed,
he was sometimes viewed with suspicion
because he spread his damage across the table with
the wine and the bread.

No one asked him to leave, but no bandaged his wounds either.
He needed reprieve, he needed sounds of tears in the voices of his peers,
he ached for comrades, he begged for afternoon visits,
he waited until someone would let him know they
wanted him to stay. From far away he knew they did,
but not one sent a card amid the floods of grief on his
office floor.

So, before the silence became louder, he departed;
old wounds reopening like springs in the desert,
like sap from dead trees,
like maple from Vermont,
like venom from rattlesnake fangs;
he took the things he needed, heeded the sign that said
the shop was now closed, took his best and old clothes
to another side of the country.

Because he had partly been rebuilt, he deconstructed.

Entering a potter’s house, he watched as the master’s fingers
shaped the ceramic almost useful. But it was marred in his hands and
before he could start again

Our narrator grabbed the clay, the almost jar,
and slung it against the room. The heaviness smashed
the finished works on the shelf of the workroom; shards
piercing the air, the skin, the wheel, and again; he picked up
the largest piece of kilned clay. Iridescent, it gleamed of summer
green and
sacred blue. Lifted over his head, both-handed, he flung the
final piece and shattered it against the door that led outside.
It was there, surrounded by fragments, he knew his heart was
finished with the brickwork of the past.

And he started, slowly, like an aging painter,
to construct his real life, his true heart, his ever-self
at last.