Hidden - By Mara Lemanis

 

Hidden

What is hidden lures me
to rival showrooms
goading me to buy
facsimiles of gospel truth
They point out idols
of the marketplace,
They warn of false conspiracies
false prophesies
that hide the fossil heart of faith,
the diamond heart
that forged a covenant
with ancient carbon
our master builder
grounded in our greening

I turn away and plunge a stethoscope
beneath the floor of smiles
hiding smirks
and poke inside the skin of thought
to smelt the bone out from the ore
that twists from nutrients to wastes
I slip past layers furrowed
with the fortitude of sullen sacks
puffed up with sludge;
They scorn my trespass
a web of winking threads, dense, chaste
They tempt me with minute openings,
false doors, locked vents,
I could cut through
wield a scalpel
peer inside the mother of all pumps
my warrior liver
laboring to purge invaders,
but it would be a cheap invasion
and show no other secret
than biology already knows

What is hidden lures me
past the limits of my hominid eye,
It sees beyond the rented light
that stains my retina
and takes me to the king of carbon
the Tree of Life
whose roots sink centuries deep
down crusts of earth to molten seas
down to the iron core;
no word my mind creates
can find the hidden variable
that spurs my thought;
It is the tree that speaks,
It is the tree
whose foliage, without a word
wafts fragrances of
jasmine, citrus, evergreen, musk
whose branches sway
with a steady undercurrent of decay;
my eyes have seen the whitest snow
surround its trunk,
press down the blackest ground
enriched with bodies uninterred
unconfined in managed plots
freely welcomed into mulch
to mingle with the scents of pine and rose
the odor of disintegrating carbon
mining flesh

What is hidden lures me,
endures in me
like maggots nestling inside mulch
that feed life’s tree
or like carbon crystals tightly packed
inside a diamond
that is not forever
just till the end of hominid time

What lures me endures
hidden in plain sight
inside my carbon thought
it sculpts a diamond
for the showroom of my truth,
exhales the words
Amen
that shake the tree of life.

Mara Lemanis

 

 

 

Biography: Mara Lemanis is a literary scholar. Her essays have been selected for 20th CENTURY LITERARY CRITICISM and are included in undergraduate student textbooks in the U.S.

She has worked as an archivist for Historical Preservation and with the IRC, assisting refugees in Oakland, California.