Sunday Over Coffee

Maybe what we are missing
is heaven.

Though how can we miss
what we have never known?

How can we be homesick
for a place
we have never been?

And yet sometimes
it seems we are.

Perhaps we build it
from fragments:

a kitchen window
lit before dawn.

The smell of coffee.
Rain against the glass.
Footsteps in the next room.
The ordinary comfort
of knowing someone is there.

A table
where every chair is filled.

A photograph
where no one
is missing.

Perhaps that is what we mean
when we say
we miss someone.

Not only them,

but a world
in which they are not gone.

There would be photographs.

Boxes of them.

Corners curled,
black and white fading into silver,
children squinting in summer,
fathers holding babies,
mothers caught laughing
before they knew
the camera was there.

And somewhere among them
you would find yourself.

Not cut away.
Not missing.
Not standing outside the frame.

The sea would be there too,

blue beyond reason,

an afternoon wind
lifting the white curtains,
salt drying on the stones,
a fishing boat returning
with its small red light
already burning.

Perhaps heaven smells
of bread and basil,
woodsmoke,
old books,
the skin of oranges
broken open by hand.

Perhaps there is music
coming from another room,

not loud,

just enough
to know someone is home.

And perhaps there are tears.

Why shouldn’t there be?

Only a hand
comes quietly to your face

and wipes them away.

The old words say
death will be no more,

nor mourning,
nor crying,
nor pain.

And perhaps
no more absence.

No more waiting
for footsteps
that do not come.

No more turning
at the sound of a voice
that might have been theirs.

No more empty place
at the table.

No more reaching
into a box of photographs
and finding everyone
but yourself.

Where sorrow and pain
are no more,
neither sighing,
but life everlasting.

Neither sighing.

Perhaps that is why
the old words endure.

Not because they tell us
what heaven looks like,

but because they name
what we cannot bear
to lose.

Perhaps heaven
is the name we give
to the impossible hope

that nothing beloved
is finally lost.

Not because nothing happened.

Not because memory
has been washed clean.

The wound is still a wound.
The scar still tells
where the knife went in.

And still,

somewhere inside us,
this strange homesickness.

For what?

Not immortality.

Not certainty.

Not even God,
if God must be explained.

Only a world
where absence
has finally ended.

A road coming down
through the hills
at evening.

A lamp already lit.

Someone at the window
who has been watching
for you.

And before you reach the house,

the door
already open.