The Savior in Gethsemane

He passed through the city’s gate and crossed a brook,
Catching a bramble at the torn hem of His robe;
A flower hung in His hand like stars in a lobe,
Trembling like a holy whisper in a quiet nook
Of the garden, or like the Spirit in a holy book.

For day was at an end. His sandal caught a stone;
It scurried into the ravine, sounding the dull
And stilling depths as He might among disciples cull
And answer questions where they stopped, day flown
And deepening into the fields and shadows of Apollyon.

“Sit here, while I go and pray,” He said, having felt
In them the trials of sleep hanging like lustre
In their eyes as under His, His words, in a cluster,
Lulled them while in the deepening night He dealt
With the imprimatur of death, the sorrow, where He knelt.

Opening Him to pain so secretly, the sills of hell
Trembled from its ecstasy, that Satan as creator
In the world could shimmer in them and as malefactor
Gnarl the will and light of God by keeping their shell
Of devotion murmuring “Rabboni” in a covert well

Of sleep. And so He asked Peter, as Peter slept,
“What, could you not watch with me this hour? I pray.”
Peter stirred himself awake, as if with memory to play
Against margents of the night in an overmastering debt
To Light, that he had forsaken wearily as Jesus wept. …

To feel rime of death and denial like a sea that lifts
From the breath of wind and floods inward, drowning
Flowers that wavered flute or birdsong, browning
And breaking them in that duration; denial that shifts
In the rills of nightfall where polyp Satan sifts

His prize, a piety: breathing the breath of lead,
Or seeing eyes and freight of bone crushed in,
Or hearing fast against a wall of silence, sin
The weight against the mind and heart, dead
As pride that hangs like pitchblende in His dread.

The twilight of that day eternally impends.
“Thy will, not mine,” and the glowing world weighs
Upon the Light, revolving in, as torment strays
Through Him that Satan is a dangling lure that wends
And stirs but must be taken in as it descends.

God rose to the call “Rabboni” as brandished fires
Veered among trees where they betrayed the face of him
Who felt the silver coins in the stirrup of a whim.
And so He repines as He is taken, and the pyres
Of heaven, burning low, wink out, as Night expires.