book of parables

My mother gifts me clippings from her garden, takes a pair of scissors to the whole tangled mess—

Guiding me around the backyard, she shoves purple spiderwort, ruellia, devil’s-backbone, golden trumpet, shrimp and snake plant, blue porterweed into garbage bags for transport, cutting each stem below the root node.

When I get home, I plant them all directly into the earth, spread fresh soil and fertilizer.

After two weeks, most everything, except for the snake plant and purple spiderwort, has withered and died— the cuttings not properly propagated first in water to allow the ends to branch and root.

On the only bookshelf in my parents’ house, in the living room next to an outdated volume of photography and an encyclopedia of Greek statues, sits a Gutenberg facsimile. The hulking spine is white-leather bound, the crimson bookmark—a silk ribbon sewn directly into the binding— dangles like a tongue from underneath. Gilded fore-edges, gold letters engraved into the pillowed hardcover with a burin, the spine emblazoned in gold.

Inside, the ornate Blackletter cascades down the page, illuminated floral designs branching from serifs, connecting to Gothic images of disciples. ◆

I remember one of the churches to which my grandfather was appointed, a modest southern Methodist building, wood-paneled sanctuary, slim windows of stained glass.

Laid between bars of lead—the Parable of the Sower, a lone tunicked figure, harvesting bag slung over shoulder, an outstretched hand absentmindedly tossing seed. ◆

When my grandfather died, we cleared out the house and the shed, threw away entire boxes of Bibles, all his sermons stuffed into desk drawers and folders—his tall handwriting in red and blue ink sprawling across thousands of loose-leaf pages, impossible to read.

Over the phone, my brother is telling me about sinopia, how the fresco painters first applied an ochre outline to the plaster, a sketch from which to work, before starting on the final product.

He tells me that you can still see the red threads of pigment beneath the haloes of saints, remnants of error and fault before they were polished to perfection.

And I’m thinking of the brown anole I skewered as a boy, from mouth to asshole with a twig, twining black intestines on a stick like some curious and tormenting god—

I was learning where I ended and the world began. ◆

All I see is a band of blue bordered on top by a lighter shade of blue and hovering above a thin strip of ochre sand.

On the beach, tangled and clumped, dried stalks of sea oats—like bamboo, or the reeds of a pipe, only thinner, more brittle.

Behind me, a wall of sea grapes— and further inland, oleander and small plots of Norfolk Island Pine.

Ahead, the water flounces in fitful volleys—melting sandcastles children have built along shore.

My grandfather is sitting in his maroon recliner, taking out his teeth for my amusement— the left canine and incisor wired to a bicuspid. He laughs, smiling, displays a wide black void in the gate of his mouth. Every time we visit, he begins with the same imperative—Tell me a story. But I never do.

I am telling it now.