After Opening Roger’s Copy of Chosen by the Lion

After Opening Roger’s Copy of Chosen by the Lion

I’m reading your books again—the two shelves laid out

for me by you and at random I pull 

Chosen by the Lion by Linda Gregg.  And sure

your name, your own hand, and your highlights, your once thumbing

through.  Different lines you’ve marked in green, a transparent censor

bar:  

                        “the soul must be experienced to be achieved”

and

                        “the world slow with desire

                        Passion announced by shadows”

and some, because there’s always bleeding

through the paper:

                        “I think of her loss and crying as I listen

                        day and night to the man upstairs whose cries

                        of pain are like a wounded animal unable to do

                        anything but suffer.”

It’s that last four lines I feel 

is the most

like you and even though it’s not a piece you’d set your mark on

(maybe you didn’t even read it, or you did but puffed out

your lips in that way you had that said “Fuck That Shit, I’m moving

on” ) and I leap, though I’m sure you wouldn’t

like it, to Jesus

and how he raised the maiden from the dead (and you'd say what’s she or he

got to do with me dead now nearly seven years and these shelves

of books with my name my pencil my green highlighter—and I’d say:

everything you silly everything, though not the girl, we know she wakes up

and we know they all scoffed and guffawed when he said she was just

asleep, no, not her or his Talitha Koum,  but this: remember when the crowd

pressed on him and the woman (Luke tells it best for me) twelve years sick

just wanted to touch the hem of him and she did and he drained a little

and she was afraid when he asked the pressing crowd so she confessed and was

healed, remember her?  Right—

what’s it all got to do with you or Gregg or all this sudden rain surging like

an orgy for this well earned spring.  Nothing.  Absolutely nothing.  But listen:

maybe it was just seeing your name again in that book, next to your high school

photograph, next to a little urn of your bones, next to…

It’s raining old friend.  Mid April.  It’s four

a.m.  Someone, somewhere, is saying Talitha koum, someone somewhere

is bleeding out, someone somewhere holds their head back into the hard

fall of it all and lets it pock their face, a ravisher's caress, while my body 

sleeps, while your bones, the cold ash of them, keep.