For Pete
For Pete
Suddenly this moment is worth all the rest.
Never has the sweetness arched so near
and overwhelming. They say a green flash
comes if you’re lucky right at the end.
Now you see it was always there.
William Stafford
Towards the End
Today, what remains of you will wait
on the shoulders of the stone vestibule
tucked under the roof of a church
you maybe never went to but intended,
when the sun wasn’t right for running
in when the rain made you more of a
penitent than you’d ever known
yourself to be and you made it, finally
back in where you’d began as a boy,
where voices, unfamiliar here, and song,
familiar inside of you, and the clack of old
women rising with their beads (does
anyone ever pray the rosary anymore
you may, remembering a grey-haired great
aunt back home) against the pew
in front of them. they grip it to steady
themselves. They’ve been kneeling their
whole lives, I bet, and I bet too, if you ask
them after mass, after they’ve put the string
of Jesus and Mary back in that pocket-
book they’ll tell you they’ve buried boys
just like you and they’ll say when and where
and how it all happened. Maybe it’s that
very thing you stay away from, maybe that’s
why you run and run and come up finished,
sucking in wind because on most days
when you get out you try to get out
before the sun’s really come up or
before the sun’s ready to go down
and the heat hasn’t or has spread itself
out enough over the water and days
you wait to watch it move and wonder
if each ripple and glint is a heartbeat and
of what if it is and when you can’t decide
you run on an don and the God you’ve come to
know passes you on the road and gives you
a wave and a nod like you’re known too,
to the whole ocean, and this God is
glad of it going on, all of it going on
while you run and hum and wonder
not of old ladies not of hail Mary’s not of
anything you’ll ever tell and now that you
have gone out into the middle of it all
that’s left of you is ash and broken bits
of bone the congregation watches your
urn and waits for the priest getting dressed
in the sacristy, tying a loose shoe maybe,
looking at where the sun is, gauging it,
and setting off toward you, nodding, lips
thin and determined, to make it
in the greatest heat of the day, make it
on this early 5th of May, 2018, make it
at a walk, a step up in tempo, a run,
a dead, dead run, and a run and a run,
a stop sometime in there, a pause on
the ripple of that light, and then, of course,
on.
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