The worm and his killer

*

Ooo! Pierced.

"I am a worm and not a man."

So there it is.

The little worm slithered along the path that his worminess made. God looked down and loved his worm, that was taken for a given. It wasn't a path or a skeleton, or a safety net, just a given.

Sun, that ambiguous good, beat down.

The orioles chirred and whivered in the palm tree. They did not eat the worm nor did the woodpecker peck it.

There was a moment of not being pecked. Existence, the richest robe, the brightest gemstone, always a match for your birth.

The words of existence were few. You cannot have too much of it and you cannot hate it because even your hatred would be more existence. To exist is inexplicable and wonderful.

The worm slithered in the middle way. Neither fear nor confidence but the middle way. Not happy, not un-, the middle. Purposeful, drifting? Neither. Predator, prey? Neither one. Kind or mean? Not that. Boastful? Humble? Not there yet. Striving, at rest? Musical or dumb?

In the middle of the middle of the middle.

There was a little child with her foot in the air. Coming down, coming down. Gratuitous shape, death in shoes. Now does the cut worm really forgive the plow? Does it really? Does it really? Is that just what the plowman says?

The worm traveled neither in forgiveness nor unforgiveness, no, but the middle way, in between. Not afraid, not unafraid, no, not brave, not cowardly, not hopeful, not exactly. Ready? Open? Hopeful without grounds for hope? Existence too abundant to simply be boxed in this world?

The worm rested in God's hand, which was not a material object and was not subject to sun. A human foot was a thread it wove.

If you love God's work, you love all of it.

I will aim for the heart, the little child thought.

But she couldn't see the heart. It eluded her and twisted.

*

If hope was a sickness, the worm had no wish to get well.

*

Now if the child had simply walked away, she would be a person who had no story, which is like damnation, not having a story. But she stayed and looked down. The nisus had fled and the creature was in pieces. It was "dead" -- what is "dead"?

It is irreversible, right?

So she cried to see the irreversible mess beneath her foot. The yolk would not go back into its shell. It clung to her and defined her.

Tears of accountability.

Bottomless pain -- and everyone had it in some way. A person's story.

"I am a worm and not a man."

END OF PART ONE

*

In time the girl grew over the hole where she once killed a worm. It existed and hurt inside her. Her husband would laugh at her delicacies and phobias. Every corner of our house has a spider, honey. Why not get rid of just a few of them?

You would open a book in this house and a spider would leap out, a little fist of congealed ink.

Let it be.

Wherever the woman went, cats and dogs and children would materialize around her. It is odd how safe and strong a basically timid person could feel.

There was some Buddhist sage who lived in a hut filled with cobras. He didn't bother them and they didn't bother him. He was only careful where he sank his foot.

She attended a rather pokey church near the university. Her husband refused to go. Organ music from a time long ago -- that was what characterized the church. She was comfortable in her great discomfort there.

The sermons merely restated things long known from the gospels. The same ideas were shuffled around and re-voiced. She felt that this was appropriate.

The hymns used phrases that no real person ever ever ever could have said. They were not exactly God's words but certainly not the words of a human. She found some melodious sonnet rolling on her tongue.

One day a young woman wandered into the church and sat down. She was not appropriately dressed, not suitable, she looked like a flower child or really a grass child, as though she'd just gotten up from the grass. The worshippers unconsciously did that horrible thing that worshippers did: they moved away as if she were unclean. They stared at the stranger, forgetting even Leviticus. Elise -- shy as all get-out and far from either a mover or a shaker -- stood up and sat next to the stranger, took her hand. it was as soft and boneless as a worm. The girl was as fragile as a worm.

They went to lunch and shared stories but later in the day the elder woman couldn't remember a word of it -- just that the girl was Una. She was "one" then. But one of exactly what?

That evening, leafing through the paper, Elise found the girl's picture among the stories of brief wonders and accidental deaths. She didn't say anything to anyone. Scott kept his own counsel as always.

She set up a cot in the back room. Her husband raised his eyebrows -- just a millimeter or two -- and said nothing. Since that was characteristic, one didn't really know what it meant.

The old hymns rolled like wagon wheels through the old woman's head. Oh, not so old really. Perhaps neither one was altogether old.

*

Does that girl live here or not? Scott asked.

I feel there's a ghost in this house.

*

Before Elise went to bed she tried to run through some form of evening prayer. As always, she was too tired to focus. It often became a deep and debilitating nap.

Sometimes the psalms were there in the core of dream and sometimes they were absent.

As she fell asleep the book in her hands softened and morphed, it began to move slowly. It was so soft that the slightest squeeze would crush it. It had an ever-newborn feel.

She knew who she was holding. "Oh Lord, my heart is not lifted up, my eyes are not raised too high." The most beautiful one submitted oneself, himself, to utter danger, even the danger of being despised. Our God had no shell, no armor.

Elise woke up shaking and in deepest devotion -- deep in the most pierced place there was. What do I do now? Where do I move from here?

What else was there to do but what you always did? The heavy woman pulled herself somehow out of the chair's suction grip. She put on what passed for a nightie then she brushed her teeth. She navigated herself to the underground region of her husband's snore. She lowered herself to bed and lay herself down.

*

The worm's soliloquy

*

Here is what I know about myself.

I am a worm and not a man.

If I do something worthy of a man, it is not me, it must have been you who have done it.


"I fell silent and did not open my mouth,*
for surely it was you that did it."


Although I have never committed a murder, my hands have this strangling thing intrinsically threaded through them. They shake with it, a worm's ghostly vertebrae. I will not deny. I will not deny. I will stop denying.

I am not -- no no -- in no way sexually attracted to children and so what terrible thing inside me impels me to insist on even saying that? Why is it necessary?

I am not different from others in feeling impelled, whenever I see something soft and vulnerable, to crush it, and this even though I myself am soft and vulnerable and essentially without defenses.

What stops me from being myself? You do, Lord.

You are restraint. You are the stopping of my native self-hoaxing. When I don't feel you elsewhere I feel you there. And this is my true vertebrae, not the other one. Insofar as you hold me back, strip me and lay me low, I love you.

Restraint is in itself a good, but I am a creature of the American 60s, the time of the worm, and so my zipper is always down, my belly and my dick exposed, everything always open and all over the place until I too am disgusted. I do not know how of myself to find measure and be measure and live within measure, to be just so. Not everywhere and everything all over the place, not standing nowhere talking on my cellphone or watching the abyss of a dancing monitor, no no no, but to be measure and to be just so. No more no less no other.

You know all this, God. Why can't i just submit to you? But in fact I know the answer.

I am a worm and not a man.

*

The worm on the cement

*

He called himself a worm but the worms called him an untouchable.

*

So what did the worm do then? He pretended to be okay. He simulated the sort of life that someone who was okay would have. He pulled himself bodily out of the darkness, the mud, the massed bed that bore our color and light. Blinking like a blindman he surfaced into the light and stretched. The world was good and he himself was perfectly normal. Right with God. Average in the sin department, neither a case of bragging nor of shame. Ha ha people said. A worm and not a man. Made an S on the cement and then a question mark. He shivered, finally revealing the truth about himself. He knew that God would have mercy on who he was, not who he pretended to be.

Feet came down solidly on the sidewalk and just missed him or else they didn't.

*

And not a worm either?

*

You - you strange boy - you call yourself "a worm and not a man" -- and yet the worms themselves want no part of you. They would prefer you call yourself something else not a worm. For they too have their worm standards of purity -- and you know you are not pure.

*

The life of a worm

*

Here theology.

I knew a worm. Let me describe a worm.

Drank. Drank too much.

The mouth of the bottle moved its lips a hypnotic serpent.

The two would kiss. Terrible taste. Pseudo love. Nirvana for Dummies.

The worm hated this relationship. In some sense even succumbing he would not succumb.

Would say: I know God means better for me.

Now the moral folk would look at him and shake their heads.

To preserve their holiness would move away and try to shut him out from -- what?

God's grace?

But what did the rich know, in effect, about God's grace? Even Protestants now thought they'd achieved their own prosperity by their own hands. Forgetting Luther they were digging themselves up by their own root.

Meanwhile the worm drank because.

Exclusion. Bad memories. Habit.

A depression that Christians claimed to be sin. Wilderness blues.

Too deep even to explore. But God was there.

Even in depression God was there.

The worm never lost his grip on God and with his worminess even had more to grip with. A grip on God's goodness. God's presence in places mere humans wouldn't go.

The worm would often say: I want to stop kissing the bottle and kiss God instead. And this is possible!

And this was even what the drinking meant.

The drinking was a fervent wish not to drink.

Imitation and perfection seemed to be out of the question. The worm could only love God and pray.

So now the question: what were God's own feelings about this worm?

*

Poem: Christianity for worms

*

So pitiably were we
unfit to meet God's terms
that we needed a Christianity
just for worms.

We had no kinship
with the saints
whose job was to sweep
us out of their tents.

We already
knew we were
unworthy
to approach the altar

so huddled
in outer
cold
unsure where

our own God was -- not was
in terms of doctrine
but for real and for us
in our desolation.

For the low and stepped on
would there be
inclusion, redemption
finally? -- or were we

tubes of hopelessness
condemned to bake
sad S's
on the sidewalk?

*

Poem: The worm in robes

*

The worm looked at the photographs. It saw
itself before it had become a worm.
Elbowy humans in their long black robes.
The sun fell like a stone. One couldn't move.

The light was like a quarry where one's limbs
lay with no possibility of shade,
no hint of shade, there never would be shade.
Light was a giant slab. It couldn't blink
or flicker or not be. Not move. Not think.

Not be a place to grow. The graduates
could only back away from where they stood
embedded in this standing -- yet our God
was there -- orthogonal to our reward,
God was the shade we would soon be dragged toward.

*

Poem: The worm and the bathtub

*

The worm sits on a bowl -- in pain, content,
both things at once. There is a theatre
confronting it -- a bathtub, white, recessed,
expectant, with a hollow to fill up.

The California shadows want to be
performers -- want to act a mystery
and not just be mysterious, as now.

A red towel hangs, a victim as it were,
and not just what a victim would have worn.
Cloth is kin to the creature dripping blood
into the bowl, the worm. A play begins,
a mystery. The tub is bare and white!

There is a stubborn doorway through its bright
recess -- both open wide and now shut tight.

*

Poem: Christianity for worms

*

The icon looked and maybe did not like
the thing "it" saw -- there was no mirror here,
there was a harrowing disconnectedness
which was no doubt the thing the icon saw.

He saw a worm, no human, just a worm
pressing its body to the filmy break
on the protected space from which one's God
looked out and not just looked, not merely looked

but reached to pull all those within his reach
those golden, beautiful, reachable ones
who "imitated Christ" -- but who were they?
And why was everyone looking away?

He pulled -- even a worm could feel the pull.
It was suffused with blood and wonderful.

*