Poem From Prison

In the long night when this world of mine
takes everything I have away from me
you keep me steady,
and we have made a friendship out of this...
one held over from another's death
a stone we grieved upon and broke between us.
One hour has made a year for us
and a day, many more
and in our separations one peace one place
is more than we were promised.
You are my alchemist--
you make it gold out of nothing...
I watch one hand support a prison
and the turn of your hair hold down my grief.
Out of the pit we have gone on trial over and over again,
and still you are there my witness,
for this is an art with you...
a tempering of steel
a sculpturing of wood
formed into a cross we sleep upon.
And the child born between the walls
despite men's anger is a silent witness
in the mind of God.
For you are His as I am His
and when it seems impossible,
you give us something new
we can hold up and then hold up again.
We go from darkness
outward
and, because we are made from the stars,
move towards Andromeda
and the spurting, milky blood of Hera,
for the way is upward
and away from the totems of the hour.
And the empty things we leave behind us
trail off like a long disease
which no one remembers.
The Sacraments accompany the Journey outside of time
and you and I
motionless and made for a moment
are alive together
in the falling year.

First in the heart
our vulnerability
and then those haunted nights
which hang there like a palimpsest
in every breath,
and the sharp December winds
that carry us graveward
and still never in the dark alone,
for we anticipate
the light.

The same voices, tremors,
the long afflictions endured
and all of it we share
like wounds that close in healing.
It is then and now
you are standing there
soul of my shadow.
And when this sentence
breaks down my will
you bring us something new
a love sufficient unto itself
begun in ritual
the Blessed hand around the chalice...
and if we live awhile
it will have
been enough.

December empty as the heart of winter
a few animals gather by the wood's edge
their red eyes darken with the coming blood...
one year closes on another.
Worlds end and our words go with us
the heritage of sadness and the mind as nemesis remain,
and we survive in a glass darkly,
blind and careless.
In the Incarnation we read the heart is fixed
to the center of the Universe...
our center too where outstretched arms converge
and broken come to rest.
We spend our treasure in a time
that groans with separations.
Through the Cloud of Unknowing
one dimly sees a conversion in the will
that says there is more than space
and time continuum.
In this year we build an altar
with a single act...
what we dream is what we are,
Lamb and Wolf together.
We have come a long way
to pass through the Zion Bead
a way which is more a silence
more an absence of Gravity.
Across the Reed Sea through the Plains of Moab
to a place that is not a place in history,
something beyond one obedience or another,
a Turning Towards...
in spite of cruelty and blind necessity.
The seed in us was there before all Matter
before the conjugations of the will
a seed in each of us The Nuptial "Yes"
so freely given
the bonding that binds and lasts through separations
and longings
that hold out against our selfishness.
And because the fruit-bearing tree
is utterly changed to a terrible wood
it consumes the hours and the years and the cosmologies
it saves for a time which is what we have
and then we suffer IN EXCELSIS
in and with The Highest.

The four stanzas above are taken from a longer poem. James Lewisohn was the author of A Morning Offering and three other books of poetry and prose when this poem appeared.