“The Bible as Literature”

She clubbed her new husband to a pulp
with a fire extinguisher when she was young.
These things happen. Years later I met her
in a class called “The Bible as Literature.”
We learned that books on scrolls unfurl
in just one direction, surging forward
like waves breaking. Paged books, however,
allow us to jump around in a narrative,
go back, leap ahead, as many of us ache
to do at times in our lives. Whether I
should have known that the way her face broke
into Cubist fragments as I tried to memorize it
was a sign she would soon turn the page on me,
whether despite her absence continued
to love her in slow-dripping biblical
time, wracked by sky-cracking thunder
and slaked by puddled honey, or whether she
flashed in and out of my life like lightning, I will
not say. She needed to keep moving. If you can
make out the shape of her person from behind
this prison of horizontal bars (the lines of
this poem) you’re a better man than I.

______________________________