In the Byzantine Chapel Fresco Museum

~Rachel Alsdorf 1 This space is built to be a relic-box: the fragments of a chapel sleeping here in a perpetual twilight of gray sun, benches of silk stone laid for worshipers. Here, I could sit forever, hour on hour, but twenty minutes from now it will close. This chapel, after all, is a museum. 2 Oh God, where have you been for all these days? You linger just beyond my whirring brain. A thousand conversations never cease, but those are spoken with myself, not you. And if at last I lose myself in sleep, your hands don't come to heal me even there. Only your mother's face, half-turned away. 3 This summer's been all iconography. I know what the lean, stern, bronze faces mean; the strange angular hands; the color scheme. Hodegetria—“she who shows the way”— I love, but as a scholar loves a book. I've never painted anything, and I have never prayed except with words and words. 4 In Cyprus, once, the bandits cut Christ down and packed his body secretly in crates, and raped his mother while she stood at prayers. The plaster wounds of both are bandaged now, and they may calmly rule and intercede. But only during listed viewing hours. And no one dares to kiss the face of God.