Something of Lazarus

Something of Lazarus…

The world asks of us

only the strength we have and we give it.

Then it asks more, and we give it.

                                                                The Weighing

                                                                Jane Hirshfield

                                                               

Is it possible to want nothing

in return, knowing the motive

is the only armor we have left

after salvaging the remains

of the gutted house, top

to bottom, all of it gone com-

pletely or gone enough that

needing it is only the beginning

of a melancholy we don’t know

how to negotiate?  Because I stood

there, in my burnedout house,

the wind easing in through

the broken glass living room

window (axe smashed and thick

handle or glove leveled, run

along the jamb and sill, it all

perfectly relaxed now under

my feet (heavily booted they’d

said) and everything else

broiled, rotted now to the heart-

wood, insides out, visible:  were

its true natural state all along

and we’ve just stepped in

and had the staves taken

from our eyes.  What lives

we lost or saved there temporarily: 

my mother, out of the house

with her portable green canister

of oxygen: saved.  Cat after cat

slinking from the smoke, curled

finally and together up in the tub:

lost.  It all makes itself known, taken

down on a list of what there still is

to be grateful for.  Of course

it’s all lost one way or the other. But

of course the memories are still

intact, right? Because who can lick

those but another kind of fire, or

sometimes a slow burner, in

another prison in the body

altogether, and quiet, a model

citizen.  My mother, in her ending,

was forgetting this way, and asked

for the old house the way all the lost

ask for the way home.  I’d grieved, truth

be told, for the spark itself, all that was

sentimental in the keeping

of the corporeal (even if it’s ceramic

or paper or (because some

of the harvest was in and piled

in the cellar) flesh and potatoes,

a record yield.  Lost.  Doomed to

spend their entire lives now

in the dark.  I think

of them from time to time, and when

the demolition team came to take

the old house down after all had been

gotten out, how bushel after bushel

took on the weight of that house

as everything fell upon them

from above: the charred gables,

the twenty-year old apple

tree beside my mother’s then sick-

room.  All of everything buried.

And they took it onto (into?)

themselves in the dark.  And sensing,

maybe, their end, they kept

their eyes shut to it all.  I’d like to

think that come spring, (because

there was a great heat in the earth

and some of those potatoes

must not’ve made it) there had

to have been a few at the bottom

of the barrel, a few among them,

that were saved and waited out

the winter.  That come spring they

ached to do what was in them to do:

reach and stretch and get by

every rock from the cellar wall,

every charred and buried beam,

and make it up through to sprout

in the lilac bush, flourishing

my father would says when it happened,

because they’d been able to save

that, by Jesus, they’d been able

to save that.