We sit in the shade, it is all shade here, so incorporeal, so many of us, all waiting for a voice, for a light, for The Before The After, the now and forever, we talk of sunsets, the way the sun might send one last piercing shaft of light up through the darkening sky, faith-hope-love coming for us, they say, these men who have seen the-greatest-of-these-is-love
But when? How long until
We are irrevocably
Called to life.
You tell yourself it is just food, knowing you want
To keep it for another time
when you could rejoice
For a year, for the first year after, for as long as it takes
like the frozen wedding cake
As though love could last forever
The way he says it does
Manna in our wilderness
I don’t know why they came then, at the heart of the hardest season of our lives, but we took them to the Aransas Wildlife Refuge. He sat in the back of the van with me and I made him do a Bible study about Jesus inhabiting hearts like they were houses, a Chinese box filled with simile and indelible pain. If I would write our story as a clever fiction I would insert a frumpy birdwatching stranger and I would accost her with my incoherent grief-
Anger is at the heart of love
overturning tables in the temple
In the house of God
The day that Miracle died we walked in the mountains. Two bears walked ahead of us and their presence seemed ordained, magical.
It was magical I tell myself even though she died.
Sometimes I feel like I am out of mantras, out of coins for the machine, no longer capable of telling myself to believe it will all be ok.
Then Casey Hathaway tells us all about the bear who kept him company in the woods we have all got lost in and
I go there to find Him too, lean into his ursine chest, sob a little.
Believe He is real, despite the feat in our eyes.
It is a note on my phone, metonymy for bottomless loss, I call her name every day, aware that lost causes are lost causes are lost causes
How will we ever heal?
How will we be whole again?
I would ask the boy on the other side of the over-priced desk
If I had the heart to keep
Picking my battles
I call her name
Stalk the neighborhood
Take the dog
Print out sepia copies of
Her sleeping, staring pensively at the lens
Reminding of me the others
All gone missing
You look at wonder every day
For love or pay
I look for love
Every day
See the missing
You.
First there was the shock-shock, which I would describe as a blanket of cotton, a fog, a zoned-out staggering thing. I am not sure how long this stage lasted, but it began to ebb when the nice women at the crisis center gave my five year old and her sisters their crime-victim quilts, hand-made, with such kindness.
The quilts underlined the permanent nature of the gift–beautiful crime victims. Undoable. Irrevocable.
Our story seemed one way for years, then just as things got safer because we knew and could protect them
The truth rolled over us, applying permanent tattoos everywhere.
I did not realize I had a thrill-seeker, risk-taker issue until the months of hunger, tears, and fighting were over…all technically either lost or a draw. Until after I wrote the book. Until after people began to disappear.
By then I had begun to walk through cold water.
Now I know why I do it. I do it because…I do it because
Because when I walk in cold water I can see you there
Through the dust
The crush of angry humans
The agony of your bedraggled well-wishers.
Your own pain indelible on your bloodied face
Dying for me
Deep
In cold water.
I miss you girl
Miss your sister
Your nieces, nephews, cousins, children
Used to sing
Break-up songs for lullabies
Wish I could write you and me
A happy kind of story instead
No lost loves, no broken promises
Hope changed into
The steady gaze of a man who can build with his own two hands
Homecoming tabernacle
For all us, broken
Chose your words carefully
Remember both your predecessors and antecedents
While neither should define you, the latter may constrain your rightful impulse towards flight
Because sometimes silence
Because…sometimes silence
Hides terrible things.
I have a hunch that when we get to Heaven we will realize that no matter how big, how wild, how impossible our prayers have been, we could have prayed for more.
Let me be clear: God does not answer prayers for evil. He does not reward our sin, cowardice, or avarice. He rewards the just, but if we pray along the lines of love, mountains do move.
Have you ever seen a mountain move? Have ever seen it lumber to the sea and toss itself in?
I have not. And as with these oh-so-solid mountains, many of the big-ticket items I have prayed for have been stolidly immobile for years.
Impossible things.
But I do worship the God of impossible things. His wry sense of humor, His unflagging love, His ridiculous, tenacious prophets, and His remarkable creation all suggest
Moving mountains ain’t no thing
For Him.
