The Gospel of Mary
My brother Peter, Do you think that I thought this up myself or that I am lying about the Savior? — The Gospel of Mary, The Nag Hammadi Library
I was not alarmed when the doves continued to coo though their wings were burning. I was on fire too. It was morning. I was there with the eleven, gathered in the vestibule of the upper room. Our breath thickened, colors deepened. For just one instant I saw the root of love staked through the ceiling. But so few of them received the vision
at its core. They tried to think it through. It was not for thought. It was more for holding and becoming. Light brandished from our fingertips
like swords of warrior angels. When it extinguished, I flashed my ordinary hands and we all laughed. Because they asked, I told them what he said to me in private, I didn't say he'd kissed me
on the mouth. I told them how I met the savior inside my head. How our thoughts entwined like bean stalks through swatches of clouds. He said "Thought" created matter, and fear is ingenious for damaging the world. He said Here is the soul, here the Spirit — the mind—a naive child between them. In the air I drew a diagram of the soul's escalation, my fingers sparking the seven heavens. I tried to show what rushes naked, leaving the body like a town one no longer cares to visit. How the soul, small and homeless, remembers then, and rejoins Spirit. How, in the aftermath, oblivion is transient, and darkness is illusion, both habits to be broken. Peter and Andrew debunked my "strange ideas" and woman that I was, I wept. Levi stepped in and calmed the others
the way the savior woke in the rocking boat and calmed the sea. They all looked at me in wonder. I spent the rest of life on earth infused with his apparition because I thought
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Deborah DeNicola is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Inside Light, forthcoming from Finishing Line Press; The Harmony of the Next, winner of the 2005 Riverstone Press Chapbook Contest; and Where Divinity Begins, Alice James Books. She edited the anthology Orpheus & Company: Contemporary Poems on Greek Mythology, and her work has appeared in many literary journals. Among her awards are a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She teaches in Lesley University’s outreach graduate program in Creative Arts & Learning and online at her web site www.intuitivegateways.com. |