One dark
and misremembered day
I knelt
panting
and concerned myself
with blood
that carries ash
in rivulets
to unseen seas
at dusk.
I came at last
then
to think
that You stood
among my ruined
footings
and asked
of me
damnable things -
unanswerable
questions:
to think that You
were about
the business of
belittling
my heart
and calling me to pocket
with some dutiful
demanding
parody of grace
my every hope
between
unanswering
dusk,
dusk,
and dusk.
And so,
at that certain solstice,
I rolled
in soot
at the roots
of your dark trees,
and slept in dust
believing
You had brimmed me up
against northern shorelines
quickly, coldly
beneath the old,
unpalmed
forest floor of stars
for no real reason.
I had swallowed by then
and nearly forgotten
Christmas
and its steadied hand
held
against the forehead of each
otherwise proud,
immutable year.
You filled me
full of fuses
and swept Yourself back
between hills.
You presented me
to inopportune nights.
In dreams those days,
I was a boy again,
and willing to brave
the stairs and patio door,
and wrath of parents
to put bare feet to the yard
on Christmas Eve.
The empty roads filled with silence;
The night moving over rails
behind the house;
The moonlight
thick
between trees;
The lone rabbit
leaving no tracks
despite
infinities of snow.
You
raised me up
in Your great stillness
some unnamed morning after
and pushed the wandering sight
from my eyes
in Your own unending grace.
And I ask You now:
how could I have known?
How could You have thought
I would have known,
on any
of those cold shores,
that Your great form
had already
lumbered through all those forests before me?
