Testi Reformation - La Dispute

Reformation

From the light above\nFell ribbons downward\nWhere against curved wood\nYour back ached\nDespite its age\nAnd you knew again\nFrom that you’d piled the pillows\nToo high or else been too high yourself\nWhen at last lying down\nYou wrapped your narrow arm\nAround her waist to fall asleep\nAt night and did\nUncomfortably by choice\nThe way in youth you\nTraded real worlds for lucid dreaming ones\nLying on your back where normally you never would\nAnd you drift into them still now\nBut by accident ending up here\nChurch\nWatching ribbons from the apse fall\nLike alighting archangels\nStaring white felt doves down\nAbove the preacher’s stage\nHandmade advent banners\nBefore ceremonies of blood\nHearing the flick of rice paper print\nThe creak of old pews\nThe voices of your elders saying\n«Peace be with you, peace be with you»\nIn fading dutch accents\nThe feeling of their strong hands\nIt was here you learned your future could not change\nIt was here you learned that life and death before you\nShare one long hallway toward a door you must walk through in the end\nThough you can’t know where it leads or choose\nAnd it makes you feel whole in some strange way\nTo see the past you’ve lost take shape like that even in dreams\nAnd it makes you feel terrified too\nWatching the door\nIs it all we want to belong\nTo something no matter what\nTo pull a thread taut\nDrag an ancient version of ourselves\nToward now and know for the first time\nHow we became and where it all might one day go?\nYou awake at three am to the soft voice of her dream, saying\n«These are the people who said that you like him would never die\nUntil you do and you will and I will too\nJust like this baby but longer, forever\nAnd there’s nothing past that door, I know it»\nBefore she drifts back to sleep where you can’t now and it’s okay\nPeace be with you\nThe room is a meadow and all tulips\nThe bed is a bench and hard old oak\nEvery father passes candy down the aisle\nEvery child draws war scenes in pencil in the margins of their bulletin\nEvery mother thumbs the hymnal and sings and it’s okay\nYou will wake up for real next time\nI know it or maybe you won’t\nBut it will always be there somehow\nAnd one day\nWhen your children’s children pull their own thread tight\nYou will come crashing through the door to them\nFlowers in your rotted fists\nThey will see what you two were and what you gave to them\nHow you slept this way even near death\nIn a rented place that was your church\nIn a half-dreamt speech on love that was your prayer and sermon both\nIn a meadow that was and was not the world you made to live and never really\ndie in\nThey will open their own door their own same way no matter what,\nand walk through it\nThey will hold the life of everyone in their hands