Stitching

She says Jesus just shows up in her work.
She’s not a practicing catholic
but she loves the stories and he just seems to wander in.

And I wonder about that.
Jesus doesn’t show up in my work. Ever really.
The dead do.
Christ, they keep passing back through that gate,
as if to undo the dying and to zipper up their clothes
first and then their old lives next.
They try to sit on their old couches
and use the remote. They try to work their jaws to make sound come out.
But it doesn’t.

The living show up too. They are full of shrugs and misdeeds.
They wound each other with little laughs.
And they write me later and say,
“Was that me? Because I don’t talk like that.”
And I tell them of course it wasn’t them. It was someone else.
And they feel better. I feel better too.
Absolved.

The rest is all big moments,
car crashes, near deaths, full deaths, murder,
pain, suffering, misery
and then little moments
the feel of the couch on the back of my bare legs,
the creak of your footsteps
on the hardwood. The incessant cat meow. Those things.

The molding of day to day,
stitched together to make week to week
patterned into year to year,
the quilting of a life,
my life,
until I pass through that twisted doorway too
and then, like the rest, try to get back out.

But never god. Or God. Or GOD.