by Jeff Newberry
i.
The baptistry waters soak my white robe, and I think of smoke rising from a factory, the way it unfurls, becomes one with clouds. Up there, I’d not hear the preacher’s voice, chanting, echoed in this tiny chamber. My glasses are with my clothes in a room upstairs. The world is a swirl of color. It’s like being inside a bottle. When the preacher places his hand over my mouth, my instinct is to struggle, but I fight it. When he dunks me, I want to twist away. Then, he pulls me from the water like a fisherman. Turns me to the crowd and calls me “Brother Jeff.” In the muted world, my father is sitting, watching. The robe hangs on me, gauzy and wet. When I step up out of the waters, I think, “I am so cold. I should feel changed.”
ii.
My father told me it was time to give my life to God, and years later, I couldn’t help thinking of Isaac, who, like me, didn’t question his father, who, like me, allowed himself to be led up some cairn to stand before the Almighty. A child, I knew only what I’d been told: baptism was the visible sign of your salvation. Baptism was washing away the old and giving birth to the new. “One day, you’ll have a new body and walk on a new earth,” the preacher told me, in the moments before I went into the waters. Now, thirty years later, I think of Abraham. God credited to him his faith, the belief of one who knew God would not betray him. I think of my father, who went into the waters himself, who’d never ask me to do a thing he wouldn’t do.
Jeff Newberry’s most recent book is Cross Country (WordTech Editions), a collaboration with the poet Justin Evans. Recently, his writing has appeared in Brevity, Connotations, and The Journal of American Poetry.