Reformation
From the light above
Fell ribbons downward
Where against curved wood
Your back ached
Despite its age
And you knew again
From that you'd piled the pillows
Too high or else been too high yourself
When at last lying down
You wrapped your narrow arm
Around her waist to fall asleep
At night and did
Uncomfortably by choice
The way in youth you
Traded real worlds for lucid dreaming ones
Lying on your back where normally you never would
And you drift into them still now
But by accident ending up here
Church
Watching ribbons from the apse fall
Like alighting archangels
Staring white felt doves down
Above the preacher's stage
Handmade advent banners
Before ceremonies of blood
Hearing the flick of rice paper print
The creak of old pews
The voices of your elders saying
"Peace be with you, peace be with you"
In fading dutch accents
The feeling of their strong hands
It was here you learned your future could not change
It was here you learned that life and death before you
Share one long hallway toward a door you must walk through in the end
Though you can't know where it leads or choose
And it makes you feel whole in some strange way
To see the past you've lost take shape like that even in dreams
And it makes you feel terrified too
Watching the door
Is it all we want to belong
To something no matter what
To pull a thread taut
Drag an ancient version of ourselves
Toward now and know for the first time
How we became and where it all might one day go?
You awake at three am to the soft voice of her dream, saying
"These are the people who said that you like him would never die
Until you do and you will and I will too
Just like this baby but longer, forever
And there's nothing past that door, I know it"
Before she drifts back to sleep where you can't now and it's okay
Peace be with you
The room is a meadow and all tulips
The bed is a bench and hard old oak
Every father passes candy down the aisle
Every child draws war scenes in pencil in the margins of their bulletin
Every mother thumbs the hymnal and sings and it's okay
You will wake up for real next time
I know it or maybe you won't
But it will always be there somehow
And one day
When your children's children pull their own thread tight
You will come crashing through the door to them
Flowers in your rotted fists
They will see what you two were and what you gave to them
How you slept this way even near death
In a rented place that was your church
In a half-dreamt speech on love that was your prayer and sermon both
In a meadow that was and was not the world you made to live and never really die in
They will open their own door their own same way no matter what, and walk through it
They will hold the life of everyone in their hands
