Jesus Murmurs to His Lover, Half-Asleep

Marya Hornbacher

Break me. There you are. Then break me,
split me open like an agate, crack me against a flat stone, hold my two halves in your two
hands and see how hollow things are. The amethysts at agate’s core are relatively cheap,
but sharp.  If you curve your hand and place it in the hollow at the base of my back
no rest it there stay there I said           I will hold still I will not cut your knuckles
as they make their slow way up my spine.

Technically, I said,
I’m extinct. Ignore the implications. Soon the rains will come and then we can all pray
in peace. There is an inland sea somewhere that’s thick with salt. You might be sleeping
in it        tumbling slowly        suspended      you might be dreaming, and I might walk
over the water to get you I said I might. Wrap you in a blanket of my hair, bend
my head.         I have seen you tremble in the cold.               I would make you a small
scarf of eyelashes if you wanted one or needed one I said I would.

Would
you row if I had a boat. We could cut the water with the prow pointed toward Japan
it would be very quiet             the sky would lift off like a falcon      we would knit the
pale thick morning mist into hats and pull them over our ears and fish for red mullet, and
I would sing you a small song, one you could put in your pocket,
a song precisely the size of God.

© Marya Hornbacher

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Marya Hornbacher is an award-winning essayist, journalist, novelist, poet, and the New York Times bestselling author of five books. Her writing appears regularly in publications around the world, including the New York Times, Smithsonian, Crazyhorse, AGNI, Gulf Coast, The Normal School, Fourth Genre, DIAGRAM, and many others. Her sixth book will be published by Houghton Mifflin in 2019. She is the recipient of the Annie Dillard Award for Nonfiction, and is a current Logan Fellow with the Carey Institute for Global Good. She teaches in the MFA programs at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and Augsburg University.