Christopher Howell

MERCY

When she died, I reached through ragged fleece of the rain
for mercy, flailed
among nail box helplessness of the others and beside the wreck of ploughed light
with its crows.
All the next winter ice clotted the blind roads and everyone
walked in haloes
of their own frigid steam and the world was terrible and white
and I thought God
would surely speak, somehow save at least something from the cold
claw of that time.
But it was not His mercy, necessarily, I wanted. After all, in the very flowering
of her life
He had let her die. In truth, it was any brand of mercy
I desired,
any thin tungsten shell of starlight hope in the dark house
of those days,
any half dead angel with one gift left to give.

Mercy had used to know me all the time. For no reason
whatever, seemingly,
beneath its gaze all the broken rock-like puzzlement of living
turned to fire blue jade
and sky. I guess I thought I was a god, or something
extraordinary,
anyway, something blessed in spite of itself. But when she died
I just sat down
in that dust we come to, in the end. Just sat down, merciless
heap of sticks.

When mercy finally woke, it must have been a little dazed and wondering
to find such dark
crowding its shoulders and me like a nickel’s worth of glass
asking, wrongly, for death

to be undone. I didn’t care. I said these are my bones, all I have for an offering. Just
give back her life. Take mine.

And mercy took hold my hand, so I could turn and face the world and say this,
but that was all.