Private, as the Small of a Back

By Laurie Klein

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Between the bridge and the river is the mercy of God. - Carl McColman

We hike in, not speaking. 
This quiet rise, with its vertebral stair 
of basalt and its buttercupped 
skim of earth, beneath pines, seems 
poised, to breathe you in. Mourners choose
places: a compass rose. 
             One last time
she reads to you, her mothering heart 
parsed across ruled paper 
drawn from the hip pocket  
nearest her womb. The words
run. How else dare we companion 
your leap? I cannot unsee 
the familiar bridge, those boulders 
below, the seduction of rapids . . . 
             Now the sack,
upended, in fitful swirls: unknowable 
you, seared to grit and glint,
joining pollen sketched across soil.
             What is this ache, 
long withheld, but my guilty dodge
conjured by shame? I shied away
from your gifted, disordered mind.
For every step climbed, this day, 
let my clothes go unwashed, my soles,
bared: ash, easing an instep, 
in prayer, this graveled heart.

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Laurie Klein is the author of Where the Sky Opens and Bodies of Water, Bodies of Flesh. A grateful recipient of the Thomas Merton Prize for Poetry of the Sacred, she lives in the Pacific Northwest and blogs, monthly, at lauriekleinscribe.com.