Just Those Eyes

Just Those Eyes

(“But you, O Lord, are…the one who lifts up my head.” Psalm 3:3)

My chest is heavy,
tight like iron hoops around a barrel.
There is a pocketful of tears
pushing out of my lungs,
there is no humidity and they dry
before they exit my body.
The silence, the sitting alone,
the constant refractive tone of my thoughts;
the sundown, the waiting for sleep,
the instant envelope with forgotten letters lost.
I cannot rewrite them,
I cannot recall,
I cannot undo the brief fragrance that now
has joined the crows that fly midday.
(Someone told me they were afraid
that,
if they cried,
they would never stop.)

But there are eyes, whether we see them or not,
there are thoughts like the still after the storm,
that clear a space for a campfire, a final conflagration
of fragments, of shards, of last wills and first loves,
of discontent and fundamental answers that pit my mind
against theories set in stone.
I no longer own them and that keeps some of my
comrades, my sounding boards, my tear-catchers away.

But there are eyes (and I have not seen them in years)
that look through the imperceptions. There are sighs,
those sans words utterances that expand the air for
just enough time
for tears to escape,
for uncertainty to be the wine we drink
to celebrate
something more than casual assent to doctrines
misused to exempt me.

And those eyes, I speak it true, are more healing than
prayers and hymns,
than ritual and fasting.
They are the food that takes us forward, those eyes,
that see everything true
and dare to look again and again.
And we find a place, a country,
an ocean fuller than heaven when
just those eyes
have taken our hidden fears
and painted them like sunrises
we thought had surely ended.