Come Hither

Without regret, leave.
Or wait for water to collect
and overwhelm any evidence or your ever having been
here.
There is no other way. We lift ourselves
beyond the casualties
of what came before (the flood, the swollen river, its overrunning),
and kneel, enclosed, in a departure of sorts,
now that each body has been placed
into its ark and sped away.
~
I hear you
still,
so close the silence full of water, what rocks
beneath us, what is shared between,
heavy breaths that pull at the air as against ropes,
each cinch tightened and relaxed, tightened and—
~
The weather vane courses on through the sludge,
its wings flapping with the current.
What man couldn’t fix, you, Lord, had,
and now the sediment
loosed as carelessly as a sack of seed split,
spilled—there is no recovery from such loss.
~
Dark-fumed,
the water now receding, now pulling us back.
Visit or visitation, whatever was meant
to warn through drowning.
We expect honeycomb and locusts, sign and wonder,
but this corruptible
moldhouse, this fleshrot, wormwhorl, the finger of you, Lord,
beckons, draws forward, lays upon the body its burden,
makes it
heavy with water.
~
Baptism never seemed so deep, the head
pushed still further under,
each embrace substantiating faith or surrender,
the senseless body floating among the waves’ incantation.
~
Who will draw you out, now
that you’ve given yourself over?
Who dissolve
your body like a host on their tongue?
What stopping place will be provided, what
rest?
Where am I in this emergence—
who comes?

Joshua Kryah
Come Hither is reprinted from Glean (Nightboat Books, 2007).