Diagram in the Dust

St. Augustine confessed, "Scarce understanding came 

even with many learned masters 

not merely lecturing,
but making many diagrams in the dust."

Only four hundred years after Christ,
this drawing diagrams in the dust must
have been custom:
if modeling, mashals, exhortations, lessons
did not sink in, did not convert overtly,
then the master kneeling
in a last resort to draw a picture, meant
that truly the truth had escaped,
bounced off a blindness, an ignorance 

too rooted 

to be easily uprooted.

For the Jews, words were signs, multi-layered,
not our banalized, horizontal, shallow things
floating in unreal space, lighter and more meaningless
than clouds shaping and re-shaping with the wind;
their word
could have been both substance
and diagram,
a perfect Euclidean sphere-word
bearing eternal perfection,
a real child of the
One.

Thereby One in the flesh, writing a Word,

leapt over 

the myths, histories, laws, schools, masters:

He made a diagram in the dust;
perhaps something so simple,
perfect,
that all not distributed in it faded into mere chaos,
Being Himself 

drawing a diagram
for a bit of marred flesh