Garden

     
Gone and back again,
yet not quite back,
I could not find the heavy wooden door
in the stone wall
by which I left the garden.

I remember it was a garden,
plants grew in rows there,
a community weeded between them,
watered and cultivated,
lived a simple life,
I among them,
But I followed my row to a stone wall
in which an unused door had been set
through which I ventured forth
into a world I thought I knew
but did not, had never seen,
where holiness is an unknown thing,
and does not have a name.

Returning, can anyone return?
I turned
When I felt the brush of a wing,
the concussion of beaten air,
startling me as if I had been asleep,
far off, a glimmer,
as I drew near, a sweet scent
and golden light in silence,
no conflict or fear,
a silence filled with choir
holding one chord like a candle
with steady flame
a canticle with no beginning, no end,
resonating with eternal life,
calling  forth dead Lazurus in every cell.
I drank like a dying man in a desert
from an overflowing well.

Then I planted poems in a row.
Dug them deep, covered them
and tamped them down.
“Unless the seed die,
it cannot bring forth fruit.”
I have abandoned them
 to the keeping law of ground.