And everyone saw
how their vague and inaccurate
life made room for his once more.
—The Raising of Lazarus, Franz Wright
Sunday and everything, even my hangover, seems ceremonious—
bled-pale light through blinds; the room’s faint
incense of lavender, cannabis, sex.
We stay in bed till after noon, waking and sleeping and waking,
eating eggs and avocado, spilling
into each other like milk. Sometimes I can’t believe
it’s real, this life: eleven months ago, it was April, the end
of years spent dormant, shut inside myself, and the world
stirred—sudden, bright, painful—before me.
It was not like being born.
However tender, I had teeth already; I unfurled my hurt
in hard, tentacular roots. Blossom, monstrosity,
crisis of form—how could I trust or be trusted, given
my own tenuousness? —But remember the night I fell?
There passed a moment in the hospital,
after the anesthetic, as I lay numb on my back, the doctors
stitching up my chin and murmuring between them,
while you sat beside me, patient, shaken, when
I felt briefly almost as if there were gods—
gentle creatures, with quiet voices and careful hands.
Autumn, then, was just arriving, and still now
it is enough—less miracle than accident—to be—
to kiss you goodbye and walk home alone, to overhear
the neighbors celebrating, their hymns rising clear and full:
Welcome, they sing, not to me,
but together, Welcome back.
