The Sundered Seams // Michael McIrvin
For Eli and Jesse
Suffering is alchemy, change is God...
- Marilyn Chin
The man, considering without cease
how his world will soon be split to atoms, takes
the hand of his boy, who just asked if God
is in this gold-lit meadow among seedheads
heavy and swaying, insects turning light
to sound as aspen leaves shimmy, birds
singing under blue and intangible white, the day
turning down through every shade of heaven.
The child reaches to be carried and is asleep
before his head hits the man’s shoulder.
The child who will one day ask that his world
be mended, every wounded atom sewn
back together by a magical seamstress,
her thread made of sunlight and bee buzz
and the slightest breeze.
The child whose younger brother, not yet old
enough for these mountains, will someday ask
the same question after waking from a dream-
rescue of younger children assaulted by storm:
the dream hero who will himself, when grown,
pray to be saved from yet another terrible rending.
These children, who have not heard talk of God
and yet can read the name as it is written
on the dying page of a late August afternoon,
in fly dance and lark flight and every turn of leaf
and flower and stem, who can hear the name
shouted in a dream tempest that will become life.
The child in a far town, someday-dreamer-of-God-
in-a-fearsome-wind; the child cradled
in the man’s arms, sleeping soundly
as if any universe could ever be less than whole.
The man, as he walks this two-track road, whispers
lessons of care and grief for his sons, whose lessons
for him, the divine nearly shouting in their small voices,
are of beauty beyond measure. Not just in love’s
every breath but in the sundered seams, in the sky,
faltering blue or black-and-spinning. Within
the inevitably failing light between
whereby we all are transformed.
Michael McIrvin is the author of several poetry collections, including Optimism Blues: Poems Selected and New and Hearing Voices (Fearful Symmetry, 2020). His most recent novel is The Blue Man Dreams the End of Time. Michael lives on the High Plains of Wyoming.