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By Laurie Klein 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. 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.
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