The Eighth Day Does Not Shut

Returning year after year to the Lord’s feasts,
I find this one refuses ending.
The Octave of Easter is a wound that never seals:
eight days, one opened side in time,
and every Alleluia puts its finger back
into the unfinished quarrel
between Your claim and my refusal.

First day: You come through the shut room.
Not memory. Not emblem.
The latch stays fast; still the air gives way.
Peace, You say, and the word does not soothe —
it opens.
I am not ready for a mercy
that keeps its scars.

Second day, third:
the bells go on striking the side of morning.
White upon white.
Linen. Candle. Breath on the altar.
I keep wanting grief back in its grave-clothes,
a manageable absence,
a God who stays where I laid Him.
But You stand where fear has bolted the inward doors.

Fourth day:
I call it doubt
because doubt sounds cleaner than self-defense.
But Thomas is not behind me in the Gospel.
He is the locked bone of my own hand.
If You are risen,
then all I have arranged around delay,
around prudent sorrow, around the right to withhold,
must break.

Fifth:
You lift the wound
as if light could be parted by hand.
Not accusation.
Invitation sharper than judgment.
Here, the torn flesh says.
Here is the place where death entered and failed.
My own side answers with a hardening,
a fist under the ribs.

Sixth:
You ask for my hand.
No thunder. No blaze.
Only that unbearable gentleness
before which every lock shows its rust.
My fingers, old magistrates of distance,
keepers of the prudent skin,
begin to lose their law.
The room grows narrow with breathing.

Seventh:
I do not touch You.
The wound touches first —
through the eye, the throat, the nailed center of the palm.
What opens in You opens me.
Name loosens.
Sequence loosens.
The self I have kept polished for daylight
starts running out through the seam in Your side
and comes back burning.

Eighth day:
again the doors are shut,
again You are here,
again Peace,
and now the week is one long blade of dawn.
I put my hand where the spear made room.
Lord, it is not Your body I enter
but my refusal giving way,
my old no flooding with blood and light.
The wound is warm.
The wound is speaking.
Mine, it says,
until even that word becomes mercy.

So year after year I return,
and the feast returns me
to this chamber where the calendar bleeds without closing.
All eight days are today.
All eight days are the side held open.
The mouth I brought for argument
tears into another cry —
not learned, not managed,
but pulled from the deepest locked room:
My Lord.
My God.
And still the day does not shut.

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Innerstellar Arcadia

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