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In Cross-Training, author and poet Dennis Marden Clark has the audacity to imagine the life of Jesus of Nazareth during the period between his time in the temple listening to and amazing the elders, the "bearded ones," and the start of his ministry, usually pegged either to his baptism by John the Baptist, or to his turning water into wine at the wedding in Cana.
This is unexplored territory, although not neglected by the bearded ones. It is all the more inviting for the silence with which they have greeted it. Clark has managed to write this opus in four-stress alliterative verse, modified by the demands of contemporary English, but all the better for his wrestling with the form.
Clark has let his imagination have free reign, from having the young Jesus learn how to build a boat, for which he pays Saul of Tarsus a princely fee to make a sail, to learning how to sail against the wind and the current, with practice runs up the Nile, before setting off for Tarshish, then Tzór, one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, then Belerion and Aberfala, and finally sailing towards a fire in the night sky, headed for the site of the Garden of Eden. To get there, he must follow the promptings of a breath of the spirit and learn to walk on water, and when he finally reaches Eden, he befriends Camael, one cherub guarding the tree of life, and Jophiel, the other cherub, after having sailed against the muddy currents of Misi-ziibi, the father of waters.
Finally, Clark has the audacity to introduce programming into this imagined world, after he has cut down Etz Hayyim to provide wood for his cross, in order to make his journey back to the Roman world, and into the house of his parents.
