For Jack

Good Friday,
I received this boy
Into my arms,
Straightened my spine
And remembered
Christ’s suffering;
Seraphs’
Illumined hands clamoring
In blind panic
After rebirth –
After the remaking
Of the tired earth;
Gasping, confused,
And undone
All together
In whatever one calls the disbelief
That angels
Pocketed
Upon the audacious reordering of all things,
When God’s great back
Turned shadow to his Son.

(You, boy, had better not ever know
The wanderings and thicknesses I have known.
You had better not:
I already love you so.)

Standing here at last
Above Joliet’s sweet entropy,
I remember for you
Pasts thick with
Sunday schools spilled out onto spring lawns
Near Easter,
When truth was simple
And words filled themselves
With only their own elegant meaning.

I have lived long enough to know
That your eyes see only shadow and shape,
And cannot read yet
Your own father’s scars.

So I stand near this window,
In this golden moment,
And take your impossibly small
Hand into my well-weathered own.

Together
We trace each unfolding river bed, two-lane,
And rail line
Silently,
Smiling, in the moment shared between us.

We understand each other then, don’t we?
While your wild, wondering, wandering eyes
Find mine?

You are good as gold;
Precious as any sunset
Held precipice
Above the Crucifixion;
Precious as any soul
I would set alight,
Or give up willingly to perdition
In the great jungle transit
Of this world; its passing
Into emptiness.

You sigh a new little boy’s sigh
Into the ether.
I gather an old man’s list of failings,
Wanderings, remembrances, follies
Into a collective of dust-strewn weeds
Along a sunlit siding.

And I give it all to you.

It is all I am, all that I will ever be,
And all I have to give.
It is my light in the sky; my wisdom;
My love; my answer; my question
That will one day lead you to
Sunlit lawns behind the church
In spring;
To know your Savior and embrace Him
In the foolishness
That brings joy;
That reveals pathways
In the endless fields,
The endless forests,
The endless seas,
And leads you to remember,
One day, distant, (so distant)
The way my calloused hand
Felt in your new hand
On this day in April,
When we understood
Each other
The way the angels
At last
Understood the need
For Christ’s own
Death;
Christ’s own
Resurrection;
Christ’s own
Life;
New
Life.