The Graft at Thaw

I stand where winter wood loosens
and the first bud clenches its green wound.

Lord, not yet flower, not yet leaf,
not yet the dark branch persuaded into fruit,
I have come with my beautiful lie of wholeness
folded under my coat like a stolen skin.

Take it.

No—
You have already taken it.

The bark of me splits before I consent.
Sap starts where shame had sealed itself.
My throat, long schooled in completion,
fills with thaw-water and iron.

I wanted to be seamless for You,
one clean vessel, one polished cup,
no crack where the old frost entered,
no missing handle, no bruise under the glaze.

But You, Christ of the pierced side,
You do not drink from my perfection.
You put Your mouth to the fracture.
You breathe where the clay gave way.

A terrible tenderness begins there.

Not above me.
Not after me.
There—
in the unfinished rib,
in the branch rubbed raw by weather,
in the scar that would not close because it had become a door.

You press Your thumb into my lack
and call it ground.

You name the hollow orchard.
You name the amputated root.
You name the black seed asleep in its own burial
and the seed, hearing You,
breaks faith with its husk.

I am not whole.
I am opened.

I am not healed as stone is healed,
by remaining stone.

I am wounded into green.

The winter wood shudders.
Every twig remembers fire.
Every knot in the body’s timber
loosens its clenched account of pain.

My hands, which kept inventory of absence,
begin to ache with small invisible fruit.
My palms darken with pollen not yet made.
My pulse climbs out of its narrow room
and staggers, sap-drunk, toward the branch.

O Maker of figs from fissure,
O Vine who enters the cut
and does not despise the knife-mark,
do not restore me to the locked shape
I mistook for holiness.

Let me be grafted, not repaired.
Let me be joined where I am least proud.
Let the missing place be fastened to Your abundance
until I cannot tell whether the sweetness
rose from me
or descended
or was always waiting in the wound
for winter to fail.

Now the bud swells like a question in flesh.
Now the air tastes of wet bark, bruised moss,
cold loam loosening its fist around the dead.

I feel You making fruitfulness
not despite incompletion
but through it,
through the torn cambium,
through the scar’s dark grammar,
through the yielded lack that trembles
because it is no longer empty enough
to belong to despair.

My name thins.

The branch says I.
The root says I.
The thaw beneath the stones says I.
Then even I is too round a word
for what Your pressure does inside me.

You do not fill the hollow.
You make it sing.

You do not erase the scar.
You teach it how to bear.

And at the threshold—
winter behind me with its white teeth spent,
the first bud before me, fierce and unopened—
I surrender the finished self,
that sterile idol with no wound for grace,

and receive the orchard of the incomplete:

green fire in the break,
bread rising from the bruise,
Your nail-light under the bark,
my lack, at last,
heavy with figs.