After Belief

Not God, then.

Or not the God
they handed me,
bright as a coin
passed down through feverish rooms.

Not the large Father
behind the curtain,
not the wound
that was meant to explain
all wounds.

And yet the ache remains.

The morning light
keeps finding the floor.
The body keeps asking
to be spared.
The dead keep their names
inside me.

I thought unbelief
would be cleaner.

A door closing.
A room emptied.
The mind, at last,
standing upright
in its own cold air.

But the old words
keep burning
at the edges.

Grace.
Mercy.
Kingdom.
Beloved.

Ruined bells,
but bells.

What am I to do
with this hunger
that has lost
its official object?

What am I to do
with the child in me
still kneeling
before absence,
still afraid
to rise?

No voice comes.

Only the world,
which was always here,
leaning close
with its unsaved beauty:

a tree black
against evening,
rain threading the glass,
my own breath
entering and leaving
as if entrusted to me.

Perhaps this is all.

Perhaps all
is not nothing.

Perhaps the soul
is not a thing
one has or loses,
but the name we give
to the place
where truth hurts
and does not kill us.

I cannot believe
as I believed.

I cannot return
to the house
that burned
and call it shelter.

But sometimes,
in the ash,
there is warmth.

Sometimes,
after the last doctrine
has gone silent,
a tenderness remains

without argument,
without proof,
without permission,

like light
touching the face
of someone
who no longer knows
what to pray to,

but is still here,

still here,

still here.