The Column

Not to the gods. We left them at the mole
with the harbor that we could not take to sea.
Not to the muse — she keeps an island still,
and we are the ones who learned to do without.

To the list, then. To the column and the hand.
To the parish books a priest bore down a hill
before the bells, before the silver, before
his own salvation: baptisms, marriages,
the dead by name — the books first, the books first.

To the bolt pried warm from a burning door.
To the clerk who spelled a dead mother right.
To the widow who turned the census on its hinge
and made a boy a family with one sentence.
To the borrowed veil that married fifteen brides.
To the grace said over ash and said over road
and said, tonight, over the page where we are worst:

no hemos llegado aún a la vendimia.

And to the ones we tried to leave off the list —
the valley’s people, who were there before
the sail, before the King, before the name —
whom we, two months a town, two months made noble,
petitioned to erase into our hands:
we keep you on the brightest page we own.
Not to be proud. To be unable to forget.

This is the invocation, then, and the whole of it:
not sing in me but sign in me — set down
the column none of us deserves to keep
and all of us are kept by. Call the roll.
Begin it with the worst of us, in light.
Then turn the page, and cross, and cross, and cross —

we have not yet arrived. That is the prayer.
That is the only country we have kept:
the not-yet, and the going, and the hand
that closes, after all, around the iron,
and holds — and does not look away — and writes.