1
He said to the angel of the Lord, “Don’t!
Don’t trouble the water—I’ve just now found
the right angle and the light is perfect and—“
“Too late,” said the angel of the Lord. “Move fast
and you’ll be healed of your compulsion, but—
too late. A woman with bunions has already jumped.”
“You wouldn’t think with clompers like these I could,”
she said. “But I just put my pain in a box
in my head and sealed it up and now I’m nearly fine.”
2
Jesus wandering by is bad news if
you generally like the cast of characters at the pool,
if you worked all year to get this particular spot.
And bad news for Jesus, all that healing
on the Sabbath—it triggered all the
everything that went wrong.
And wouldn’t the angel be jealous? Thinking “Jesus
I’ve pretty much got it covered here.
People who most want healing, they move fast.”
3
This pathological seeing of ourselves
in everything—no, I’ll admit it–
it’s me. I see myself.
Lined up for healing but just never quite in time.
Marnie Bullock Dresser lives in Spring Green, Wisconsin, with her husband and son and four cats. She has recently taken up the ukulele and intends to write songs for her students on things like plagiarism and sentence variety.