The Immensity of Operations

The boy gets an important
phone call about the summer job
at the supermarket
up the road
and down two other roads and
he got the job. He puts the cans
in the bag and the cans are already in the bag
and the boy will put the cans in the bag and
another boy gets no call
from a girl, from a priest, from a turtle,
at the moment when the phone
does not ring and no one picks it up
and no one looks at it.

When the phone is ringless,
no one thinks about the phone.
No spirit possesses the phone.

Nobody knows, nobody knows but Jesus,
Our Lord, Jesus Christ-
who has and uses the capacity
to see all phones in an ever-occurring glance,
all phones, all livers, all shoes,
all tongues, all penguins, all boys,
all microchips, all rainstorms,
all tectonic plates, all gladiators-

Jesus is a Roman soldier at the moment,
driving nails into the palms of Jesus,
driving nails into the halfway built frame
of Greg and Nancy’s
cabin in southeastern Colorado.