Corpus Christi

"Corpus," they say, as in "habeas."

Sea and land as flat as a brain-dead's beep,

though pricked with little rigs-oil, chemicals,

nobody knows for sure. The Lexington

a gallant vast rustbucket redolent

of world war's canned heroics; a stale old maze

of pure-gray passageways an inch of iron

away from watery death, men drowned like moles

is moored across from the aquarium,

where numb-jawed jewfish, jacks, and sharks,

circling and staring, illustrate some styles

of underwater survival. O stupid life!

The city's Tex-Mex half lights candles to

a Christ the Anglo half chews down with shrimp.

John Updike was bom in Shillington, Pennsylvania, in 1932. His most recent novel is Toward the End of Time (Knopf; his most recent collection of poetry is Collected Poems 1953-1993.

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