I'm Sorry. The Savior Has Been Delayed. Novena Day Five




I’m sorry.
The Savior has been delayed.
Won’t you take a seat?

Novena: Day Five

                The seasonless river
lays hand and handiwork
upon the world, obedient
to a greater Mind, whole
past holding or beholding,
in whose flexing signature
all the dooms assemble
and become the lives of things.
                                                Wendell Berry
                                                The River Bridged and Forgot

All summer, all the fall and through
most of the winter you and me
and a few of our friends

from down the road or across
the street would tramp
up and down that hill and into

the old wood’s road and make
kid camps with sticks
and pine branches

and one time an old Army
blanket and hassock that I bet
is still there, what has it been?

forty years?  And I wonder how
is it you or I haven’t arrived
shriven to this place and you and me 

nearly fifty?  I’d like a warm
cup of tea please before
I say that buried

there on that hill, she makes
a quiet grief for us all, it
is always pulsing, the first in the family

plot.  Surrounded by bantam
white blossoms in spring
and bees, we stayed away

from that hill while
the blueberries made themselves
over from small green knots

to soft drops we’d sneak
into and around and make our camp
fed and declared

fit.  I’m after it being told
honest and upfront, to saying
hey this, and hey that, and I’m sorry

and I’m not because the dead
have been dead long enough (is ten
long enough?) I hate giving their life

a make-over.  We ran up and through
those hills stung and broke
open with our purse of curses

and blistered sorry asses.  Didn’t we?
Admit it.  Say it to yourself at least
that when day after day you waited

and waited for him
to come home and save us
and he didn’t you didn’t

save any faith in his even meaning to.
What more can be expected
from a fine Catholic boy who prays

to a benign and unobstructed,
unintrusive God who’s not coming
in this lifetime, no matter

how many times that hill
transforms itself from little
bells of white that once

buzzed pulsed and liked clean
rain and  gets hard and swells
lets itself drop off in all the sun

and fog of the summer
come undone in the palms
of our pinched fingers,

with the lips and tongues:
we’ve done it
picked them all honestly,

the summers of our harvest.  Maybe
that’s the grace we’ve been
waiting for all along,

and we ate it without
knowing what the hell
it was.  Maybe we didn’t miss

the savior at all.  Maybe
being seasonal, the savior dropped
by just as we were

opening our eyes
to cry at the end of the belt
or spatula for the third or more

time that day, and once it was
done, going up on that hill
and picking berry after berry

sweet as Jesus, holding hands,
gripping our wits and making
our mouths true wound blue.

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