You Will Not Be Alone

YOU 

WILL NOT BE 

ALONE

                                (Is this true?

Is this true?)

                       (Can writing this poem make it less true?)

                                                                                                                New Wife

                                                                                                                Mark Halliday

That was the last of it, standing

hip to the podium to take in more

of the weight coming in from the front

pew, as if standing like that will be

bracing and keep him

standing.  I caught on, we all probably

caught on and made ourselves

lean in to hear the migration

of the small moths (an eclipse I’ve just learned,

when they’re rising up

together), they fly up from

the page like all the words he’d ever worked

out on his own, which story

would mean more being

retold to her next to him and his family and his friends?

And maybe it was the last line

that made the most of it all:

how it was offered so quietly it could be nothing

but complete

honesty: you will not be alone.

And isn’t that what, coincidently, and moments before,

the priest, culled from the retirement pool, (who

confesses he never knew Bob) said

about Jesus being dead,

that he descended

into hell and Catholics, good, lapsed, recovering

believed that and isn’t hell he said, nothing really

of the fire and acid but instead the ungodly

depths of being

alone?  Isn’t that really hell?  I’ve imagined

all my life what it might be

like, this dying thing we all do and hate

doing (don’t fuck me over, you know you’re afraid)

and maybe the only comfort I can take

away, standing or kneeling at mass

or sitting down while the funeral cars curve

their way through Salem is that all the traffic

stops for us, and maybe this alone thing

is the last stop for everyone.  And so have we

made a heaven for ourselves to delay

it, or maybe we can rename it to tame it

and maybe it keeps widows

sane in the nights they lay awake

in their noise-

less house and even

their crying is silent, like it’s not

allowed somehow, and this—this living

thing is just the space between

birth and death and isn’t it

lonely sometimes and isn’t it

lonely sometimes and Jesus! like a frostbit

hand in a soft winter wind creeping

in and no one not a least of a one

to give a damn to throw

coat on the shoulders of the torso

the button closing mostly, mostly,

poor soul we say as if it will never happen

to us, poor soul.