Poetry from The Literary Review
Journey of the Magi
Jonah Winter
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Highwater marks of the soul: An origami version of happiness, a tin-foil star for a compass. Tobias, blind as yesterday, following an angel to The Last Supper and other points south. These are the things I think about: Indra’s eyes, whatever interstate runs through Nebraska, Aeolian harps, played in the night wind. Ah wilderness is a suitcase someone forgot to pack revolving on the luggage belt in the baggage claim area, the flight long since arrived, the passengers long since departed. This is the story you put behind your eyes and project, like a movie, until the mirror which contains the world gets top-heavy, cracks, splinters into a thousand shards that fall into a pile at the foot of the cradle where sleeps the infant whose breath fills the heavens one star at a time. I have no home. I have no name. When I speak, no one hears me. This is because I am a block of ice. When you see me crying, I am not crying. I am melting. At the rest area, the map says “You are here.” Whether you are in Nebraska or Wyoming, or Indiana, it always says this. And there is always a large man exiting the men’s room with his shirt untucked. Just when you think you are making progress, the thousands of miles you’ve traveled condense themselves to a single point, a Nativity Scene in which the Baby Jesus is conspicuously absent. I imagine the nails must have hurt. And then to watch his mother watch him die, to see the world getting farther and farther away, fuzzier and fuzzier, as if it were a dream sequence containing the future of the entire universe: the moment he dies is the moment he wakes up and everything comes into focus, Mary, Joseph, humanity, all of us mere shadows of our future selves. To keep myself awake I obsess over former girlfriends for several hundred miles. If this doesn’t work, I repeat these words over and over: “The Bears. The Bears. The Bears . . . ” Sometimes, I perform this incantation while meditating over the girlfriends. There is usually snow on the side of the highway that glows beneath infrequent lights. Above the interstate is a night sky. Behind the night sky is a blue light bulb. God turns it on before he goes to sleep. Stars are windows we drive toward, slumped across the wheel, never quite getting there. Charlottesville is a place. Indra is a name. Christmas is a day on which we celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ. All of these things are transparencies placed one on top of another. When you turn on the machine, this is what you see: a blue light with many words and images that don’t make sense preceded and followed by total darkness.
We drove through the night, taking shifts, never stopping except to get gas or coffee or use the bathroom, or all three, at some somnambulistic service plaza in God knows where, zipping our jackets as we filled up the tank, looking out towards the dark interstate and beyond to the land of endless coke machines . . . Falling asleep while driving through New Mexico, knowing no one, watching for tumbleweeds that blowout of nowhere in front of the headlights, dreaming now and just like that I’m in that other world—the world where you’re alive, right beside me, wearing your shirt that says “Marv” and talking on and on about some girl in Tucson and I know exactly how this dream will end, how it always ends, not with you slumped against the window on the passenger side, breathing steadily, with one foot pushing down an imaginary gas pedal. The future is an all-night diner just up the road, where there is always one of those revolving multi-level cake-stands, containing a slice of coconut pie. |
