S

 

There is a hole in the center of this poem 

and we cannot touch its emptiness, 

its vast and capricious longings 

to be filled and filled up, and again 

to the brim, till it more than runneth over. 

And that is God’s greatest mercy, 

that we can not comprehend the simultaneity 

of hard rock and soft moss, 

of storming waterfall and trickling stream, 

of me on this mountain and the hermit thrush 

perched atop a noble fir singing out over the cliff. 

The extremes can’t possibly meet, but do. 

There is a hole in the center of this poem, 

and I would fall into your arms 

a thousand times falling and never 

righting myself up again, tumbling 

into the sludge and piss and dream of you 

like a naked dunce waiting 

for the sun to rise in the west. 

You and your extreme, me and mine, 

and in the center a hole 

we have reached across lifetimes 

to mend and tend together, foolishly,

because love’s abyss is our birth right and glory. 

A ten-year old girl got a new kidney last week. 

She is alone in the hospital bed 

eating vanilla ice cream in stoic silence,

because padre and madre and abuela are all working, 

and she is afraid of the voices that follow her 

though the throbbing night. There is a hole 

in the center of this poem, but we press our hands 

together becoming nearly one in prayer.  

She mightily gives thanks for one more day 

of being alive despite the hole,

beside the hole, because of the hole,  

and home is the thing feathered by hope.