Meditation at 6 PM, and: St. Dismas

Abstract

Meditation at 6 PM, and: St. Dismas Sarah Barber (bio) Meditation at 6 PM Of interesting things in the kitchen,let me remember these are not the least, this water and this potato. Even leavingaside the familiar miracles of pipe and pump and chlorine, the complex filteringsystem that lets me piss in the river I drink from, let me note how water fillsthe Pyrex the way it does, quick blisters into the cup, the very rush of it cloudingitself up, then settles, pours into a superlative clarity through which I see grains of salt fallto the bottom of the pot. And let me consider, as I scrub this potato with a potato-shapedbrush, how, though no potato is truly ovoid, this one is like a pebble or old boiled eggin that none of the three should be eaten: for this potato is green. But let me praise,while cream thickens over a low burner and butter softens in its wax paper wrapper,how this potato grew in horseshit and kept on growing all month in its bowl on the counter.Let me not throw it out; let me not think, as I fold dishtowels into small soft squares,of vomiting or the gastrointestinal tract but that in twenty minutes we’ll all be onlytwenty minutes older. Let me watch the pot. [End Page 69] St. Dismas He’s patron of the honor block, good thief,the famous late penitent—and might you not,dwelling in the desert, also murder to rob? Amen, I said, and signed up to teachat the supermax, Amen, but did not meantoday they should be with me in paradise which is my backyard by the river not farenough from Dannemora’s wall, thirtyconcrete feet through the village the prison built in mountains convicts mined. Hereis its post-office, here is its gas station,between them the wall. This road is closed but here are the troopers, here are the dogs.The manhunt lasts three weeks and I am notJesus, I lock my doors until I hear one’s dead, the other caught. Like anyone elsein the northern counties, I’ve seen the holein the steam-pipe and the smiley face on the post-it note that read have a nice day,I’ve tried to imagine how naïveone might have to be to smuggle tools or drive a getaway car or think it could notbe dangerous to be living in a place like this,bolt after gate after wall not unlike hell in late medieval images of its harrowing—here is St. Dismas, holding his cross,while, like a common criminal, Jesus [End Page 70] tramples demons who might only be doingtheir jobs, the only steady middle classones they could get in that region of bare storefronts and rocky farms. I don’t knowwhat makes a man kill a man—but eventhe river hates its dams. It floods that June: fish flashed through my backyard’s grassand, as if this paradise were not provisional,the geese grew bolder every day. [End Page 71] Sarah Barber Sarah Barber’s poetry collection Country House won the Pleiades Press Editors’ Prize and is forthcoming in fall 2018. Copyright © 2018 Pleiades and Pleiades Press