I hope mommy is sleeping in heaven, she says
No. I say, she is dancing and singing in heaven
People don’t sleep in heaven
I wish I were in heaven she says
We have work here for now, I say. That is why we have God time–sing and dance
So we are ready for heaven
When it comes
She wore a soft, pink sweater (her sister bought) as though the cool chill of October could touch her anymore and the small group of people gathered at her ad hoc memorial are floating up as the sky darkens
The ashes and the pink sweater and the flash of inexplicable light get me again and again
I have to conjure some litany for this–
Sprite, fly
Luminesce
Alight upon yonder shore
For years I have wondered if I would see you there
In Heaven
When so many of the things you have said to me
Seem so tragically
infernal
Grief been here before–Target was closed and we drove
In my presbyopia I could not identify the man or his freaked out dog
Who can tell between Sirens and mermaids? They are both capable of artifice and the old-fashioned waterborne howl in
Such dark waters
I swim back to the day
The park
Beauty all around
And fast food wedding feast
Pregnant bride vomiting while
Someone took money from the medic’s bag
How did we drive back across that precipitous bridge?
All I can do is elide the best of you with
What will be
What must and shall
Be.
John 2:5 KJV
[5] His mother saith unto the servants, Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it .
When we met Mary and Charles they had some vocabulary specific to the western Pennsylvania region. They used the word yins for the second person plural, the way a Texan would say y’all or a Parisian would say vous.
I’m-gonna-beat-yins-to-the-house! She would yell joyfully, running up the small hill to the porch.
Eventually she lost the yins
But I am praying that she did
Beat us to the House
The thing itself seems too big and awful–she liked to shoot up in the bathroom, the list of people who enabled her suggested a big bathroom
Why do this thing? Where do the needles come from? Where do they go after? Do heroin addicts have sharps containers?
I make the elements of the equation as simple as possible–
Keith died of it
Mary died of it
It must have been a doorway
Why do you walk through that doorway the first time?
What is through the doorway that is so compelling that you must go back–no matter what
What were they running from?
She tells the story as though they were just cooking bacon
Who lets a 4 year old cook bacon? Who lets a 4 year old watch a fire burn or find their own way floor to floor to grandma’s apartment?
Who falls asleep on the bus back from the methadone clinic
With a baby
My baby. My baby now
I cannot turn away
If x equals the thing you must have and y equals the way it makes you feel
Then they were simply bound to x because of y
Like sky or free diving
there is a rush
But this time, this thing, chained her to it, brooked all reason
in the blood and the brain you cannot undo
Alone
Genesis 12:13 KJV
[13] Say, I pray thee, thou art my sister: that it may be well with me for thy sake; and my soul shall live because of thee.
Modern translation–I would rather live without you than die for you
It is as though Abram knew he must treat his soul like a kidnapped child–my soul must live, sister, let my soul live.
It feels like chattel to me, the moment Abram exchanges his wife for his alleged soul. We are all cowards sometimes, I know this, but it is amazing that this guy is the guy by which all redemption covenants are measured and paid.
For what good does it do for a man to
Gain the whole world and lose his own
Soul?
God gets her back
Because God never breaks a promise
When Mary talks now on the Fisher-Price phone of loss, she speaks with a five year old’s falsetto. She is breezy, upbeat even, and we exchange pleasantries through the medium of her daughter’s voice.
Mary, the girls have your laugh, I try to tell her before the line cuts off. Mary, I always wanted to be your real mom, I tell her before the line clicks off. Mary, that last day haunts me. The girls talk as though you still have the giant carnival unicorn, as though you tucked it under your arm and carried it right through
The earth will soon dissolve like snow/The sun forebear to shine/But God who called me here below/will be forever mine
Genesis 12:5 KJV
[5] And Abram took Sarai his wife, and Lot his brother’s son, and all their substance that they had gathered, and the souls that they had gotten in Haran; and they went forth to go into the land of Canaan; and into the land of Canaan they came.
My daughter has to do a slide show about very small souls, cupped in the hand souls, lost at sea souls, their tiny lives made consciously insignificant by human design alone
There are quiet, tree-lined lanes in the arteries of the capitals of the world where pretty twins play while their siblings become the interstitial jigsaw pieces of a world built without reference to
The souls they had gotten in Haran
What is a man’s soul?
And what will he give in exchange for it?
For what does it profit a man
If he gains the whole world
And loses his own soul?
Carrying Light 