|
ELIZABETH ROBINSON
THE MANNA
climbs up from the ground
wan and wiry
leaves its skin adhered
to rock and soil,
spits
on the sun and so:
night.
*
I remember the scent of the
Sunday School classroom,
calla lilies outside the window,
the story's promise that
lost, hungry people will get,
at least,
manna.
*
Eat if you want and
all that you want
but only during such
and such hours.
*
Only later did I learn the rules:
that they were to eat immediately.
The manna stuck to the earth
like a blousy coverlet.
Left in the sunlight, it dried up
and perished.
*
Manna, fey ghost,
scrambles up
from the darkness
and eats
the dawn and leaves
behind a white
shadow.
*
An improbable story offers the mind
other improbabilities.
That manna snuck up on the wanderers
at night and left its trace
by dawn.
That manna carried the trace of
man.
Sounds like—
And the hand cups the ear
to hear
night.
*
At daylight, then,
you may open your mouth. Peeling
this sheerest bread off
the surface of the earth.
Redundant, like
hunger.
*
Hardly food at all, was it?
Not real bread, was it?
Temporizing
contemporary
scholars scoff:
Actually a fungus, or
the dried exudate oozing
from the broken bark of a tree.
*
White rind, white
all the way through,
white rime on the lips of you
who eat. Eat
what is given while it is still
a given. While it is still
not really what it is.
*
They were not to complain,
the hungry ones.
They were to take
what they could get.
Like them, my discontent
stains me with its pallor.
We say, "delicious,"
not because that's the truth
but because we have no choice:
when we eat manna, we become manna.
Such things as
*
these ripen on the crust
of the unpromised land, too ripe, too
sweet. Manna eats only
what manna gave up
and then the spilled
food on the floor's
unblemished floor
is no longer plausible.
*
I loved this story
even as I left the story,
looking out the window
at white flowers and thought,
"White food."
In the sunny Southern California air,
I saw an impossible, edible
snow falling
and then melting
before I could finish
imagining it.
*
How did this slightest
surreptitious white figure
slide through the night—
shedding skin on all
the hungry places unless
hunger nurtures darkness?
And darkness was manna's
habitation, bleaching itself
of all presence so as to make
morning
out of night and its fragile
remaindered crust.
*
They said also
"Holy Ghost"
all the time. (Who did?)
Another white figure,
another wafer
(was it manna?)
and the Deliverer
must be the one who
brings food we
must eat which
might be human flesh—
manna the man's
skin parsed and passed
in the darker sanctuary.
*
To be faithful is to
not know who speaks.
A voice in the darkness,
wool blanket kicked off
in panic, the tent collapsing,
They? A white figure gleaming
in the dimmest corner
of the eye.
*
Those who refuse to eat
what the Deliverer delivers
are punished, as I knew well.
Alone at the kitchen table
before a dinner I would not eat,
my mind wandered out
the window where
the evening descended to meet it.
*
The manna rises,
a glowing semi-human figure,
almost liquid,
jerking awake in hope
of the dark.
Pelt hardens to horrid white.
Now. Eat now.
The manna sowing
blanched seeds—
hunger, lostness,
desire to be at home—
all tossed onto the nomadic horizon.
*
After the lesson I would get up obediently
as the Sunday School teacher
handed me a can of
(what I did not realize was) water,
and a paint brush.
We all went out into the morning light
and painted with this magic syrup
on the sidewalk: pictures of
houses, flowers,
candy in frilled wrappers.
The appetite of all possibility
gleamed on the wet cement until
air and light ate it all away.
AUTOCORRECT: TWO
|