Lacuna

And ______ came down from the hill
dust to the ankle,
with a burr caught in the hem.

The fishermen left their nets.

In the water were Simon,
Elias, Mara, and
a fourth name dissolved beyond reasonable recovery.

Seven houses in a row beside the salt road.

A woman laboring in the first,
bees behind the walls of another,
a blue door belonging to ______.

But by evening there were only six.

An old woman asked where he had gone
and pressed one finger to her mouth.

The copyist drew a black circle beside this passage,
about the size of a fig.

Later copies sometimes show a well.

At Capernaum, ______ entered the temple.

Lamp smoke, goat hair,

aging figs collapsing in their bowl.

He whispered something to the flame.

What happened next tore a brown scorch
through four whole pages.

The blind man saw ______
and he wept.

A woman sick twelve long years rose before sunrise
and walked backward into the sea.

She returned carrying an egg.

When it cracked, her husband found another shell inside,
soft and blue as the vein in a wrist.
A tooth rattled at its center.

A word commonly translated as miracle
in accounts of wounds, doorways
and errors made during construction.

And ______ said,

Blessed are the ______
for theirs is

[worm damage]

He who wakes
with dirt beneath his tongue
shall

[illegible]

Keep your lamps

[illegible]

The white animal beneath the house
must never be

[page ends]

At supper, thirteen places
had been set for twelve men.

Bread, olives, and wine.

Among the dishes, several tiny bones
which nobody mentions eating.

One chair stood away from the table.

Peter counted the company,
and then he reached for the chairs.

A note in the margin reads,

Peter, leave it.

At midnight, ______ entered the garden,
and the Greek becomes difficult from there on.

A noun used nowhere else in the surviving text.

An early translator tried orchard, scraped it away,
then wrote,

... where absence waits for its body

Someone later attacked those words with a sharp blade.

One cut passes through the parchment
and removes part of Judas from the other side.

After this,

rope, iron, vinegar,
a sandal lost on the road,

three women whose names have migrated into the margins,
a hill outside the city,
and ______

fixed there.

Above him, the sign survives only as,
KING OF THE

Seventeen more lines follow obediently.
Empty.

The tomb was opened before sunrise.

Linen neatly folded once.
Two coins near the wall,
and a dead moth caught in the cloth.

Mary found something damp on the stone,
and she touched it.

For years afterward
her bread always tasted faintly of rain.

The manuscript ends inside a word.

Much later, someone attempted to draw
a face beneath the final line in faded purple ink.

What remains —

two shallow marks for the eyes,
the beginning of an ear,
and where the mouth should be,

a hole worn through
to the next page.