� copyright All Rights Reserved Wilson, Richard S.

(after M. Bayley)

To pen a gospel
you hardly need more
than a cast of characters:
an adultress, a righteous crowd,
and time to kill.

You can always
flesh out the details
with a complication and climax:
that the crowd grew nasty
and then challenged the rabbi
with the law's demands while
slurs grew heavy on
their tongues and stones
weighted in their hands.

But a clean denouement
is harder. One depends
above all, on God's
good graces, sins scribbled
in the dirt, eyes lowered
along with the stones,
and without a doubt,
the first foreshadowing
of recognition
this side of the garden stone.