Past rich hotels and gated snowy parks,

Steel bridges spanning and subway trains rattling

The stations of the living and the dead,

I follow the unreasoning river to

A building like a ship that’s lost the tide.

In that stone hull or nave, the elements

Revert to early versions of themselves,

Maintaining order as I enter, watching

Till the depths appear to be familiar,

Heavy doors anchoring down the stillness,

While the tight blood threads the ego’s maze,

And the old mind recuperates its bearings.

Sole occupant of this unbusy world,

Abject as a shipwreck where she kneels,

A crone holds out, salvaging her substance

With the long groaning pulley of her beads.

We have no point of contact. I cannot

Kneel with her or help her prayers to reach

The far-off ear of God. I cannot track

The spirit in its labyrinth nor hear

What heart in its intelligence might hear:

The hourly precision of a bell

Tolling our Golgothas with love that galls

The grounds of logic and the stones of sense.

I’d like to walk on water to her side,

The crone whose suffering has to harbor love,

Who slips her beads into her winter coat

And signs off. Two strangers passing, I think –

But standing in the aisle, white as frost,

She stares at me as if some wrong were said

Or done, never to be undone, unsaid –

Like our first parents’ first sin and its cost.