by Brian Volck
“e nardo e mirra son l’ultime fasce”*
-Dante, Inferno XXIV
What I first saw when they lifted the cloth
from my head were his eyes, still wet with tears,
and thought them shed for what I had suffered,
not knowing—as he did—how his own death
stood certain and soon, mine merely deferred.
Yet who among us was prepared for what
would come? Neighbors, fearing one once buried,
soon cursed me; dogs whimpered as I passed,
sniffing death’s stench as if I still stood bound
in rough sheets rank with the ooze of decay.
Only Mary, my sister, sensed his hour
had arrived as he sat with us again
days before that turbulent Passover,
intuiting without words occasion
to fill the room with more fitting fragrance.
Kneeling, she embalmed him from ankles down
with pungent spikenard dripping from her hands
as a servant might wash feet in water,
wiping the oily excess with unbound
locks of hair, clothing herself in his scent.
That is how I recognized his altered,
risen form: the wounded feet anointed
with aromatic nard and hints of myrrh
that mantled me as if in royal robes,
unmerited, but nonetheless conferred.
And now I find myself between two deaths,
longing to live more fully, awaiting
a body not discarded but renewed.
Though the grave demands another meeting,
in this, my scented shroud, I stand ready.
* “Nard and myrrh its (i.e. the Phoenix’s) final winding sheets,”
Brian Volck is a pediatrician who lives in Baltimore. He is the author of a poetry collection, Flesh Becomes Word (Dos Madres Press) and a memoir, Attending Others: A Doctor’s Education in Bodies and Words (Cascade Books). He teaches theology and medicine at St. Mary’s Seminary and University in Baltimore and is a Benedictine oblate at the Monastery of Christ in the Desert near Abiquiu, New Mexico.
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