caesura

Michelangelo gave me a beard and a ring of keys

and not one painter, in five hundred years,

thought to ask

where a saint goes

when a saint has to go.

The frescoes ignored the bladder.

The gilt and the trumpets, the shaft of holy light —

nobody paints the small back hall,

the sign I made from a torn-out psalm

That says BACK IN FIVE

and under it, smaller,

sorry.

they arrive still warm.

Every one of them mid-something —

mid-laugh, mid-argument, mid-swallow,

a grocery list still folded in a hand

that isn’t a hand anymore —

and they come up the path with the light of their last screen

still on their faces,

not knowing yet,

looking at me the way you look at a stranger

when you’re about to ask directions.

And I have to step away.

It’s the worst part of the job-

Not the standing. Not the keys.

It’s that the body I got back up here

still keeps its little clock,

and every so often it calls me down the hall

while the newest of the dead

stand blinking at a shut gate,

still warm, still mid-whatever,

waiting on me.

I’m sorry. I want to say it to all of them.

The old man asking where his wife is.

The kid whose laugh is still half out of him.

I’m sorry you crossed the whole unspeakable distance

and the last thing between you and the rest of it

is a man

who had to go to the bathroom.

I wash my hands in water

that tastes like the first morning of anything

and I hurry. I do hurry.

I come back down the marble at a limp-quick trot,

apology already on my mouth —

and the line hasn’t moved.

The line never moves.

They waited.

Where else, now, would they go.

The old man asks again about his wife.

And I know — I’ve known for a thousand years —

that when I finally swing the gate

and let him through to look for her,

he is going to find her,

and she is going to be nineteen,

and he is going to be nineteen,

and neither of them will remember

the forty years of afternoons,

the chairs worn to their shapes,

the way he learned her breathing in the dark

well enough to sleep against it —

all of it, gone,

traded up for something they say is better,

and maybe it is,

and I will never know:

because I don’t go through.

I hold the door.

I stepped away for ninety seconds

and made a dying man wait,

and it is the smallest sorrow I will handle all day,

and it is the only one

I know how to be sorry for.