Wake up, wake up,
we’re waiting,
it’s sunny, you’re late,
he’s at the door,
he’s waiting, come
down and say hello.
Here is today.

Best friend’s impatient,
spine’s rusted to the mattress,
Mother’s been up for hours,
childhood is too clearly
gone. Can you hear me,
come on,
let’s go.

Head in pillow, there is
emptiness in these mornings,
a kind of restless discomfort in
okay, keep ignoring me.

I wonder which moments I'll remember.
Head pounding, voices calling,
wake up, good morning, good morning,

goodbye,
I open the door.

The University’s gardens are different at noon;
different, too, in rain and gloom, but no less lovely.
In the fourth garden, a hill rises like a twisted spine
against the flatness of the rest: hiding keepsakes, a forbidden lifestyle, bones.

I think of my own poor posture, of my once curved spine
made right from years in an unforgiving brace.
I want to forget the people who made their homes here,
beneath a now grassy hill, where a different kind of unforgiving held them captive.

On Easter, I question your existence again.
I want to find you exactly right--
or not find you at all.

Strike one: there’s no sign of you
branded on the toast
I make hastily at 5 am.
I eat quickly, but still I’m late
to meet a car that has already
driven away; strike two.
Strike three is the unexpected loneliness 
of climbing a mountain in the dark,
with a group I barely know,
on my first holiday
away from home.

But when we reach the top, perched among
the mountains of Virginia as the sun comes up,
amidst cries from my companions of “He is Risen!”,
I imagine you not as you’re known but
as I want you to be--
in the heart of the boy 
who didn't climb here with me
because he slept too late.

(1)
Once, I did not have memories.
Long before words, before sin,
before hopes and dreams.
There was no God then.
Just a feeling so intense
it must have meant alive.

(2)
I do not remember
how it felt to be born.
I do not remember anything
before the need to christen –
to put letters to the way I
felt and the things I believed.
To give the numinous feeling
I had lost the name
of God,
a word without a memory.

(3)
In the home where my grandfather lives,
I observe the way he stares at my brother and me
with a desperate yearning to run and dance and play with us
like a child again, to feel intensely the things
we do now. Trapped in a single room, he wishes
to forget what it means to be lonely, to return to
the state of ecstasy before memories, before words,
before sin and hopes and dreams. There was no God then,
and there is no God now. Just an emptiness where, once, there was

(4) yù yī (noun):
a feeling so intense
it must have meant alive.