Issue 4.9

Dilemma *For Sister Regina Wachowski, Father Luke Tupper MD, * *and their colleagues of the Esperança Hospital boat.* While you worried about maybe giving up some of your hard-earned cash, while you were imbibing ideals of self-help, taking responsibility, promoting a can-do attitude, while you tried to weigh up the pros and cons about what they were really up to and felt concern about foreign missionaries providing medical services to the poor in what was then, and arguably still is now, a neglected country; while you, who’d had so much luck in life, watched—an outsider, a curious observer— they were busy getting on with it, administering vaccines against tropical diseases, carrying out full-blooded surgery on cleft lips, cleft palates and club feet, performing urgent oral procedures aboard a converted San Diego ferry on the Amazon, volunteering their skills, giving time out of their professional lives as medics. Did it matter if the surgeons, nurses and paramedics were victims of misconceptions, if what drove them were myths about a man who died two thousand years ago, a man, they say, who set out to help the poor? Did it matter if they were beholden to incompatible ideas of science and faith, if they worked under the aegis of a Church obsessed by politics and power, mired in controversy and even child abuse? Did it matter that the ingenuous halt, lame and blind of the area believed in miracles? Do the numbers: add up both columns, profit and loss, assign a value to goodwill. Still, doing the right thing for the wrong reasons left you caught in a dilemma. You look back, fifty years on, a lifetime for some. At least you helped, a bit, in the end, you paid the port fees. But, surely, they’ll be in heaven now, if there is one, for good.

If I Had Death in My Palm Yesterday, I ran out of life amid the abundance of time. My doctor told me that I had no life, but he could see plenty of time on my hands: the time I take to travel to work or church, the time I take for sightseeing and visiting friends, the time I sit around waiting for a meeting to start, the time I leave my house for work, waiting for gates to open and trains to arrive, the time I sit around, waiting for my work to start; the time I take to take my time. Yet, the river of my life was running dry, carrying lumps of air to the ocean and the sea, emptiness weighing heavier than bags of mountains. What dried it up? he asked. No need asking me to commit a crime, after I said I had no life to spend in prison. But if I turned my body over to time, I might have a new life to spend on earth. I squeezed my palms together; the juices of life flowed like milk, out of the opulent breasts of my time. How did I arrive at this moment, that I had life stowed away in my palm, that when the air dried up, and there was no water in the reservoir, I might return to what I used to be? It was my father who brought me to speed, to save some strength from my tiredness, preserve some courage and confidence, live like the cockroach and the rabbit in holes abounding in honesty and truth, to hold falsehood and lies at bay, and carry no burden unworthy of my head. I have carried my ransom on my hands, to pay to whom it may concern, when my life escapes into the palm of another, and I be left stranded wanting more. But who dares collect ransom from a lifeless man, when he cannot spare his life the rebound?

I Am Napoleon, Tomorrow Morning arrives, filth with it, filth which curses the heart. Night falls, weakness with it; my empire withers, opportunity dwindles. Perhaps the next morning brings ambition, perhaps the following night brings discipline, yet they never come. I am Napoleon, tomorrow.

The Kingdom We find a tarp in the suburban wood-- the foliage in the firepit decoys flame and a sunbleached beer can surfaces from the tide of soil. My kids climb through cathedrals of felled elms and a susurrus of decay; the hermit thrush begins to sing and I think of the last denizen listening to his song, reedy and tuned to the coldness of a star.