Saint Paul Says Drive

Says,
let’s go.
In the middle of a pandemic
touches down on Summit Ave. in the city named after him.
Finds me sitting against a tree reading
some poem or other, some non-world-transforming
thing, and says,
Come on. Let’s go.
I don’t ask who he is because
I can tell by the bulbousness of his nose,
by the high forehead and the shiny bald dome
and the gangly running frame who he is—
he’s all things to all people, and for me, he’s got a vintage 2004
#21 KG Wolves jersey, back from when we almost went
to the Finals. Almost, thanks to Kareem Rush raining three
after three over Wally Szerbiak’s outstretched hand. Saint Paul knows
about this local tragedy.
Where are we going? I ask.
You know how many poems you write about me,
he says,
and now I offer you a chance to ROAD TRIP with the author of
First and Second Corinthians, and you’re worried about
WHERE?
This was a fair point. But also the first gratuitous use
of the third person of many to come. (Turns out Paul
does that in everyday speech, too, not just in epistles.)
Anyway, we drove—he first, then me.
He said he’d been around the U.S. a good deal
since his death but—and this was strange—had never been to Disney World.
You
want to go to Disney World, in the middle
of a Pandemic?
I asked. And then he began to explain how
Disney World was actually the perfect opportunity to offer
witness, not just to individual people but GENERATIONS,
for it was always FAMILIES there, parents and children.
It was a new Areopagus moment, he said—
did I know that speech? Pretty well, I said.
Oh I don’t mean that little Cliff’s notes version
Luke wrote up in Acts of the Apostles,
Paul scoffed.
            This must have been somewhere
in the middle of the country, maybe Ohio?
and I remember mayo all over his face
from a Whopper Burger
(guilty pleasure,
he said)
and then him saying quieter—
the woman, Damaris, she had just lost a child.
She wanted to know what I meant by Jesus
raised from the dead. You see? She ALREADY KNEW
what it meant to die with him. And now there was
good news, too.
And Paul started to cry there, somewhere in the middle of Ohio,
his face a mix of smeared mayonnaise and tears, remembering
this young mother who’d lost a son, killed in some battle
in a war no one remembered anymore.
He got off the freeway, pulled into a gas station
and continued to weep, big body-wracking sobs
that confused and frightened me.
The woman Damaris,
he kept saying between sobs,
She is the world. The WORLD, you see?
I did not.
After many, many tears, he finally quieted.
Then he pulled out of his pocket a small, silver crucifix, the kind
you can pick up for a dollar at religious goods stores anywhere and just
stared at it. And his breathing began to slow down
and his face relaxed. And I looked too,
the familiar arms pinned to opposite sides of that miniature
instrument of torture, the little halo behind the Christ’s head.
Don’t be an outsider, Zach,
Paul said to me then
and handed me the one-dollar silver crucifix.
Honestly, I didn’t understand what he meant by that either, but I nodded my head.
I held it for a moment and pocketed it.
Then I turned the car around. We never did
make it to Disney World. We drove back
in silence occasionally punctuated by sniffles
or the blowing of a nose (mine and his). He dropped me off
where he’d found me, next to that tree on Summit Ave. And that was the last time
I saw the Apostle Paul.