I try to establish timeline–
It was the spring…close to Passover
How long had you been dying?
How long had you? he retorts, not angry, incisive.
Surely I have touched a nerve, who else gets bullied for coming back from the dead?
But it is the one question he answers, the one time I hear his speaking voice–
Same as you, from the moment I was born.
John 11:14 NIV
[14] So then he told them plainly, “Lazarus is dead,
I tell him the questions I still have which remain unanswered, and when we are sad together I ask him about his singing voice, say I don’t worry about the faults in mine anymore
Both of us so far gone now
Past the scrim of polite society
John 11:1,3 KJV
[1] Now a certain man was sick, named Lazarus, of Bethany, the town of Mary and her sister Martha. [3] Therefore his sisters sent unto him, saying, Lord, behold, he whom thou lovest is sick.
In the waiting room, I try to act casual, as though I have not followed him here, studied his story, combed it for gaps and terrible silence.
I prattle on about my own sodden sorrow
Unsurprisingly, he is an excellent listener.
But he holds his peace, his haunting piece, tragedy and conjecture, punctuated by improbable
Glory
John 11:3 KJV
[3] Therefore his sisters sent unto him, saying, Lord, behold, he whom thou lovest is sick.
In my hunger I sit with him, follow him from room to room. Marvel at his silence
He does not have to tell me what we both already know, but I trail him regardless
Want something from him
Whether it is what he saw so long ago now or what he will not say
About the days of our mutual confinement
Of course, neither of us chew
scoop cold water to our waiting lips
In the congregation of those
Waiting for bright sunlight
Resurrection
He moves up the wall quickly, ascending over three thousand vertical feet in a little over 3 hours. We all marvel at him, as well we should, that kind of hubris and fearlessness is an altar to the human spirit
Who fails to see the God who held him there
All along
I go back to Alex’s choosing the rocks over the ladies
As I count days and hours and minutes and seconds
A slow hunger crawl
All fat girl dependence not on
Finger strength and will power but the dorsal strength of a lullaby–
Who knew the bosom of Abraham was the ICU at the Birmingham Children’s Hospital or that anybody could become impatient with the nearly-returned-from-the-grave, this is sleeping beauty territory, he says, so many years after the event, as he stays with me through the insomniac watches of the night. You see only a muted scrim at first, but later you see so much more, the way time can be a tomb, and you in it, Lazarus,
It is He who always has
Walked in and out of these rooms with me
Delivering Light
The bowls, cups, and occasional ramekins return my level gaze. All damaged, we regard each other warily–the gash, the chipped and missing pieces, the jagged edges
Make us all precipitous,
Weepy as we
search for impossible answers for
Broken
How do atheists turf their ghosts? Wispy girls, long gone, in their place, algorithms, aggregates, the trees were old back when we were young, how wise they will be when we have left this place.
Who will bear the children of the dead? Who will tell the grown man
How pretty, how young you looked in your operatic yukata, how many letters have been written for you, all for you
Careful, I say, careful.
measure out impossible prayers to a Most Evident God
As though they were
Leaves caught in the wind
Could be a lost child or the appearance of a tear in ordinary fabric. Could be the silence of the resurrected or the name of a wildflower on the back of a bus, here today and gone tomorrow no recorded words, no age, no cause of death, just a suddenly re-spooling life
As though you could call what we do here spooling,
as though any word at all could substitute for resurrection.
Carrying Light 