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God
Mary, my baby sitter, once took me on a bus
to her shabby boardinghouse in Jersey City
where she showed me a white plastic statue
of a bearded man wearing a bathrobe
who stood on her dresser among her dime store perfumes.
I remember Mary telling me “This is God.”
God was about the size of a bottle
of eau de cologne, light as a chicken bone.
I held Him in one hand, turning Him over,
the way you’d examine an object
you’d picked up off the ground, thinking it was
just a rock but a minute later discovering
it was a gold ring, and how lucky you were
finding a thing like that
when you weren’t even looking.
In Sunday school, the rabbi told us
that God was invisible. It was a sin
even to draw a picture of Him
or to say His name out loud.
If you did, you’d die on the spot.
But here I was, staring at God, holding God,
and I was still on this planet breathing.
My best friend, Janet Crosio, had the same
statue on a shelf in her living room:
I thought it was one of her mother’s knick knacks;
I never dreamed that it was God.
Mary told me God’s name—Jesus Christ—
and that his mother’s name was Mary, too.
But Mary—my Mary—was sixteen, Italian,
a high school dropout, a heavy smoker
who lived in a boardinghouse, alone.
Why my mother had hired her, I don’t know.
I quickly slipped God back to her.
And while I waited to be taken home,
still amazed that I’d seen God,
I stared out of the second-story window
at an ugly concrete yard below.
On the windowsill, Mary’s glass ashtray
overflowed with ashes and cigarette butts.
I wasn’t thinking, something came over me—
I blew into the ashtray, and ashes flew
into my eyes, a whirlwind of ashes
stinging and burning, gritting up under my eyelids.
Rubbing only made it worse.
I had to cry the ashes out, every last one—
tears like burning rain.
I had to be blind for the hour or so
until I could see again without hurting.
Since then, I often confuse revelation and pain.
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Jane Shore’s six books of poems have garnered the Juniper Prize, the Lamont Prize, the 2010 Poets’ Prize, and a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. Widely anthologized, her recent poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Salmagundi, Moment, and the Best American Poetry (2019). She teaches at the George Washington University, and lives in Washington, DC, and in Vermont. [See this link for more poems by, and information on, Jane Shore.]
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