In the morning, I broke the earth
where the cabbages would bloom
and Brother Tom introduced me
to John of God.
A tiny man from Vietnam who spoke
in fractured English and was probably
a refugee.  And then, the farm work done,
and we loaded up a truck with old school desks
and ourselves into the cab, and Brother Tom,
who talked like a broken faucet about
things
of no particular holiness, drove us through
the country to a rusted warehouse
tucked inside a cove of pines,
clumping the desks inside where
they would wait to be destroyed
for scrap metal, which the brothers
sold along with the fudge they made,
and Brother Tom told me
to stay behind with John of God
and lock the sliding doors,
and this we did,
and afterwards, I looked at John of God
as if to say,
What righteous task do you have next?

When I told you what had happened,
you asked me why I hadn’t hit him

maybe assuming that violence
comes easily to me.  I’ll admit,
I wish it did.  I wish that I
were one of those who could so simply
pluck the crisis from the air
but my heart is equal shares
glee and horror when I imagine
how it would feel to really put
my back into a swing: like
a bellyful of something lawless.
But more than that: you weren’t there.
You didn’t see how like a child he was
as he was reaching for my cock, even after
I had pushed his lips away,
how like a brute it would have been
to knock him down,
and maybe, confused as I was then,
in Gethsemane
fleeing from the next inevitable drunk,
I knew that I too had been lost
as he was, reaching out with his small gloved hands,
taking my face and pressing his sun-hard lips
into mine so fiercely that,
at first, I thought it was only
a mistake,
that he’d confused my mouth
for just another plot
of hard earth to be broken.

# # #

Ben Hall writes, teaches, and breathes the dust in South Korea. His poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in The Bangalore Review, The Dead Mule, Levee Magazine, The Manhattanville Review, Diagram, and others.

Photo: Craig Whitehead