with scenes from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)
A wooden church on an island in a lake
I love never closes;
I rode a rented bike to think towards God
on a Sunday morning built from the surrounding forest.
Eleven staves of pine, one white fir,
the central pillar sprouting acanthus leaves,
the miniature longship
suspended from the nave, from a time
when ships and churches sprung from the same techniques
of tongue and groove joinery,
and the proportion of the place—max capacity 38—
all flattered my heart to float
the idea that it had entered itself,
or something like it, intimate
to this glen spiced with summer fern and petal,
dragon heads of many licks
at the steeple’s bowsprits. That day’s reading—the demoniac
whose possession shudders me. “My name
is Legion, for we are many.” Even the gospels confuse
what’s singular, what plural, as the demon ask
Christ to enter instead
the herd of swine as he saves the man living
as if dead among tombs. That the pigs,
two thousand, shortly rush the cliffside
into the sea and drown suggests what
kind of victory? There’s a story
about Achilles, long dead, and Amazons
who land on a Greek island called his—
he possesses their horses, who throw
their long-dear riders off then eat them alive
before rushing to drown themselves.
Thus Achilles cleaned up. Thus Achilles, still angry,
and strong horses and stronger
women dead. Or, that’s what one storyteller
wanted, said. The Lady Elgin,
carrying over 400 souls
(we become that word we avoid so easily
in maritime tragedies), was struck by a lumber schooner
in a September 1860 storm, and her captain
ordered all the cattle herded off the ship
into Lake Michigan, to lighten her load
before she split, anyway, in two—
and that’s true, down to the bottom of the lake I love.
I’d never want to know what it knows.
When two men named Doctor Jones
find themselves on a beach pursued
by a German gunner with nowhere to go
but a killing sea, it’s the father who opens
his umbrella and clucks a flock
of seagulls up into the engine, the wings,
the cockpit cracked now as it crashes
from the flush. He strides up
to his reluctantly stunned son.
“I suddenly remembered my Charlemagne—
‘Let my armies be the rocks
and the trees and the birds in the sky.’”
Charlemagne neither wrote nor spoke
any such thing, but it sounds too good
not to admire, not to remember as real.
Indiana searches harder for his father
when he’s with him; skeletons
in Venetian catacombs are more easily impressed.
He and Elsa absorbed the walls and rats
by torchlight, blowing bone dust
and spiderweb to academically inspect shrouds
and chamber carvings, pagan then Christian
and that one? “Ark of the covenant,” he says.
“Pretty sure,” he smiles when she asks,
and we, who’ve seen him see it, laugh.
Never mind whatever Dark Age artist
shaped this image would have only imagined it:
Indiana confuses what’s made-up and what’s
remembered. He’s had enough proof of God
as should ten thousand times satisfy
anyone who asks for proof, and yet his disbelief
(his father will slap him, hard—“That’s
for blasphemy”) proves that proof
is never the point. It’s always a leap
from the lion’s head, and never finished,
which might be Indy’s mistake: to look behind
and think I did it. I believed. My faith
comes and goes like a pendulum, my father
used to say. One of the first
poems I ever memorized he wrote
when he was a boy, a ballad of a boy
and teddy bear: their play, and how close the bear stayed
to the boy’s side through a fatal fever.
His parents in grief were so overcome
that they left as soon as they could;
and they left everything as always had been,
as God leaves a tree in the wood.
I remain devoted to this last line
(the poem ends very
sentimentally, with the bear dusty, alone,
still waiting for the boy to come back),
which strikes my heart now as it did then:
that God does not abandon so much
as He lets be. Was it some instinct
towards mercy, away from torment,
when those pigs ran into the sea?
And where did the demons go then—
into fish, into hell, into the swells and shallows
of Galilee to wait for wading feet?
We drove, my father and I, to an island once
to watch the sun rise—his hip
hurting too much to walk the shore,
he sits in a chair by the parking lot
next to the one he brought for me.
I wear his racquetball champions jacket,
I roll up my jeans to feel my feet
flinch at March’s Atlantic.
Scattered everywhere, spiny crustacean shells,
aftermath of ambush and feast
still florid with color. I arrange
them all into a fish shape,
on the sand I trust
secures us between land and sea, even
here, where water waits for us in all directions.
Katie Hartsock’s second poetry collection, Wolf Trees (Able Muse), received the Philip H. McMath Poetry Prize and was one of Kirkus Review’s Best Indie Books of 2023. Her work has recently appeared in Ecotone, Prairie Schooner, Image, Literary Matters, New Verse Review, and RHINO. A finalist for the 2025 Vassar Miller Prize, she is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Oakland University in Michigan, and lives in Ann Arbor with her family.
