You, of course, are the eyes behind my eyes and the ear
whose hearing holds the ocean’s chorus—that sea
from the world’s first waking, long ago—and so
there was nothing new to say.
You gave no word of consolation
when the pain was bright as beauty, only the long finger
of sunlight reaching over to touch my hand, and the echo
of past laughter
that must have filled Lazarus’s laying place, too,
tilling the still air when you stood before the tomb
and listened to silence speak. You, the Word, the unspoken
answer to the unspeakable question.
You, the silence. At his tomb. On your cross, submitting
to gravity, to the slow march of time. Where is the rhyme
in this, then, where the turn? You, who are the word,
the volta, and all the breath between?
You, gardening time, as I unpaper onions in the kitchen. You,
keeping watch as my watch keeps the hours. You,
tending the seeds sorrow sows, as I sit in the bathroom,
in the stairwell, in my chair, silenced by this white page,
on which no elegy is birthed. This blank landscape,
untouched by hoe or spade or lead or ink. Familiar to you,
who wept as Lazarus lay asleep, who counted Mary’s
tears as angels kept watch.
She, seeing some shape of you, gardener; you,
offering no answer to her question but yourself, silently,
no pleasantries or platitudes—the wordless Word,
the silence that speaks.
And so I say nothing at all to you, who are both poet
and poem, and you stay with me at the mouth of death.
Watching the folding of flowers in the twilight,
the world as unreal
as a child’s distant memory. Listening to the sound of nothing at all,
which betrays the reluctant beat of this metronome heart,
beating still, keeping time, knocking on the door of death
until the day it swings open.
Or until your tender voice calls me by name. Until the beauty
is brighter than pain, and time’s hidden seeds flower,
and the door opening to a garden as wide as the sea is more true
than death’s last lie.