Are there ends to our forgiveness?
Ends we don’t see until we reach them.
Deceit, betrayal, violence.
Can we spot them before our very bones are broken upon them,
our better selves tumbling over the edge of the world?
Asked what the Resurrection means to me,
I said, The end is never the End.
French films and fairytales
have led us to believe there ever was an end,
that no tension existed between happily ever after
and the end, that they didn’t both fight to be true.
As lent comes to its close in darkness and dazzling light,
the flood gates loosed, death losing its sting – again,
are we not left soaked and stung
eyes searching a horizon we cannot see
as clouds surround the city?
And him, his eyes sewn shut by a self-consuming nervous system,
an unreliable heart, lungs collapsed into brown paper bags, can he?
Can he forgive?
The cult fueled rage that burned her down and left only glass,
brittle and sharp, upon which he fell
and broke?
And the demons that built the cross,
sewed their flesh into its sinews,
afraid to decay in graves they themselves had dug,
can they?
Forgive that nothing was finished.
Even I, afraid my own mind
too fragile to bend,
will gradually arc and endlessly splinter,
have I hemmed in my forgiveness as well?
Dammed up life with trees I myself have felled
prevented the inevitable waters from tumbling forward,
afraid the edge will betray another curve,
arriving at the horizon
just in time to witness the sun disappear
behind yet another mirror,
afraid the waiting,
cell upon cell, the scabbing
that builds islands of lava streams
that I, flesh and bone, bricks and mortar, spit and mud,
will leave myself
can leave myself
to be fashioned, scrubbed and remade new?
To acknowledge
the complete and utter fallacy
of ends.
