Halfway North

Just past Randall Park in the shadow of the First Congregational Church
my kid, who is taking me to the Joynt for $1 beers
between Good Friday and Easter, asks me about the whole Jesus deal
and I tell him the 2 block long version,
where Jesus comes in on a donkey, adored –
but fickle is the crowd and five days later
they are dragging him through the streets through blood and shit
and no, they didn’t want Jesus released, “let Barrabbas go instead!”
A mulligan, a spear, blood and water, and then in file the church ladies on Sunday,
as they always do – a rolled away stone, some comedy with the gardener.
Oh, Barrabbas? Though I am not sure I say that I think he became a follower.
But maybe he just hightailed it out of there with a backward glance –
started over and found new marks in a new town,
new moustache, new tunic, new Birks,
his time on the cross leaving him
with scars on his palms that itch from time to time,
a fear of heights, a resolve to take what he can while he can.
He won’t live forever.
At the Joynt Tep pours us $1 Point beers, Hamm’s, GrainBelt
in 10 ounce glasses. She says she tells people she likes that
her name is Tep, and those she is wary of, she says her name is
Erica, or Eliza, or maybe Emily, which is kind of brilliant.
Unless I’m real drunk, she adds. Then sometimes she forgets.
It’s dark and lined with curling photos from the 70s and 80s,
Dizzy Gillespie, Gary Snyder, musicians and poets and it’s also where
in 1990 or so I smoked my first cigarette, picturing a fried egg
and my brain on drugs.
I tell her, Tep, that my kid here is graduating next month, as I did too,
in 1991, and a look of deep concern crosses her face while she does the math.
“Oh.  But you can’t tell.”
as though I was released by error or mercy into the world,
so long ago, gone on to take what I could,
holding a beer that’s gone just now
from half full to half-empty.