Imprint of the Stereoscopic Cards

If  you make the connection between this table and that table,
then you will remember your grandmother’s loaves of bread
and from there you arrive outside the gates of Jerusalem.
Your jealous and unkind aunt Virginia, who is six years older
than you , has made it a rule that you must look at each card,
even that one of the lepers.  Your grandmother knows nothing of this.
Rotting in rags, their voices crying, “Unclean, unclean.”
The lepers’ lips are eaten away.  They hold out their stumps.
Bones come through their soiled wrappings.
And yet they are odorless on the stereoscopic cards.

Bread is made twice a week on the scrubbed kitchen table.
You are seven, waiting for the boxed tour of Jerusalem.
The trick of two eyes and two photographs.
Then your whole body enters into that place.
You take in your mouth the warm buttered bread
from your grandmother’s white flowered hands.
You sit with the viewer; waiting to slide into focus
the lettered and numbered cards and to hold
for the rest of your life these cast-out bodies of lepers.

–Read at St. Lydia’s on January 22