Easter Evening

parked by the river, that ice blooms shattered asters

across the windshield like eyes pried open,

the clear glass a starved sheet of mind

with something finally written on it

by that anonymous finger.

But then it’s gone, and I know this is how it is for us:

We are told things but they melt away.

And when the words go, or when we know

instruction was never

there, a great absence comes like a sky

with all its living creatures huddled against the part of us

split open at the tip by weather

or desire, the garden we rake and rake again

until there’s nothing left but the waiting.

This is what we ask the dead god to rise into.

But it isn’t the right request, and he grows quieter

than the silence he already kept,

as when a man decides to leave a woman, decides this is

the only thing that can be done to save both.

In this way we are told it is over.