Filament

The students said to him,
Is circumcision useful or not?

He said to them,
If it were useful, fathers would produce their children
already circumcised from their mothers.
But the true circumcision in spirit
is altogether valuable.

-- The Gospel of Thomas (53)

Now more than a year
after your death the door
is different somehow,
more fraught with real suffering
but gentler too, calmed
by the way you walked through it
alone without looking back,
leaving the remnants of
your passage here like a
a meal arisen from half-eaten.

That’s how much these poems
matter, only as filament
in a bulb which burns
the short while of a life,
whose power came from elsewhere
and arcs now into regions
none can read inside this day.

Yet how much of what
remains of your life here
adorns the insides of this boat
as I too make my way
toward that door – not
so much the photos and
journals and memories
but the way all that
washes the walls a sadder
sweeter blue, like the
garden at first or last light,
my boat stabled by
the serenity of such beauty,
of making good of what remains.

Now I finish poems and set them
in an order so that my conversations
with God too may seem complete,
as complete as any heat-to-heart
and heart-to-heart and heart-to-art
-to-God talk could ever be,
taking care to erase all
the blunders and
excess and wrongfulness,
the final draft washed
clean by tears and ocean blue,
the way the waters now
cover all but your so blue eyes
at five years old,
wanting all the world you lost.

Small work I know
and a private thing
while others proceed
now through that door
in no sensible order
and all before we
can say a proper goodbye.

And there is so much
more to profound and
celebrate and further
in this day, with summer's
pelt now rich and deep
outside the window, lifting the
whole wet world into song
& my wife, my wife,
soon to wake and
join me in this dance
of what remains.

She and I share our own filament,
you know, woven from
all these years, as fragile
as it was the first night
we met and talked all those
hours, as true as when
she handed me her phone
number written on a cocktail
napkin, the numbers glowing
with that light we still
reckon our hearts by
as the years cascade
down their drain.

You barely got a shot at this
heart, brother, wounded
as you were: the work
I carry on is so much
more in heart than art,
boor and bore that I am.
Perhaps we help to light
your way each time
in sleep one reaches
a hand to the other’s
and we clasp, sending
a soft glow through the
worlds where you are
a walking now with God
and the Beloved you
were meant to love for all time.