Pilgrimage

All night we trudged past old towns
naming the mysteries of your childhood.
Like beads to an old prayer, our rhythmless feet, 
tugging litany into litany, one glory strung
into the next. Great eye of the moon unobstructed
above us, dear black sky opening
and opening: I attempt to match your pace
beside you like the rest of your devoted city,
hungering forward, longing to taste
what trickles down into that quiet space
this fevered hurry hollows out. Is this faith?
I watch the branches of trees bending out
over the horizon. In this restless light,
what can they reach with such longing for?
What angel off the edge of this edgeless 
dark won’t descend to hold them 
down? Beyond breaking? You know better 
than I. Who knows anymore what we are
passing through, for what the passage itself
requires that we become avenues? Our Lord
scourged. Our Lord we scourge, too, though
we love him, and because we love him,
we long to touch his body mangled
before us, slip our lives into the abyss
of his hands. He holds them up to all 
our languishing mouths, oh morseled flesh, oh 
makeshift country, oh hurrying world we know
not the threshold to. Still we hurry. So even you
begin to hurry, you shuttle me through the din.
From above, how must this convergence begin
to appear: this pilgrimage of ghosts, now 
approaching, the moon held above us, the host 
now transfigured, this rounding, this fullness, now
swelling and pulling us up with such hunger I wonder
if I could reach out myself past the brink
of my hands. Break it in half.

Before You Go

I have a poet friend who never asks
for me to write him a poem. 

Even if he’s read every verse
I send him, looks up
the references to mythology I keep
littering into the metaphors.

He holds my hand through the messes
of heartbreak, all the unmoving
desires they mystify and obscure 

as they clamber onto the page,
as they clamber into life

like the bodies of believers
being resurrected at the end
of time. At the end

of his life I wonder
if he’ll know what he never asks
he has already been

living. Look
at the light streaming in
from the canopy. Our days

together we never wrote
perhaps knowing even the myths
must envy the mundane miracles

they are trying to tell.
Here. Can you tell

in this warm afternoon,
as we pace through the heart
of the old city—

searching the Sunday market for stews
and spiced meats
we will assemble into
a feast in the quiet room—

what immortality is
glazing our bodies 
with a gentle sheen 

not even a poem 
can begin 

to keep alive?