The Way Home
For Jeanie

All night we drove the icy backs of the mountains,
following the slick black ribbon through
rock passes where beautiful falls of frozen water
waited to be released; over bridges
spanning chasms of white silk.
The stripped, dark bones of the trees
strode up, down every gorge,
still upright against the smooth grip of the snow.
Sometimes we topped a ridge to see a valley spread below
smooth as a cotton sheet, blue and glowing.
In the center, there might be a house lit,
gold spilling out onto the yard, touching the barn,
remembering for us that these were
the waiting weeks before Christmas,
that blue-silver dark time
in which we await the advent of the
we know not what.

In the end, these lights led us
through the spare landscape
and the unknown route.
Every few miles we would see in the distance
a homestead lit against the night,
Inside each one a life that knows
something of what it means to love in this world.
This carried us when we at last reached
the wilderness of turnpikes and detours
and the sleeping city.
Still the bold lights called,
waved us on from block to block
until at last we reached your window,
you looking out for us,
waiting against the night,
a flame, burning.

When morning came, we lit all the candles in the house,
from both ends. It was advent.
It was the last days.
We sat with oil lamps, waiting for the bridegroom, the
we know not what. Call that the day I learned
that waiting is sacred. I remember
her beautiful, quiet face bent over all the colors,
changing them completely as she painted,
and you at your journal. I remember how we did not talk
for long periods. How we broke rules,
just this once, let carols take wing from the piano
and soar through the house
though it was barely mid-December.
We were awaiting some different and more difficult birth--
the time would give.

Around us is the holy sanctuary
you have built from your shared lives--
altar spread with drawings, sculpture,
photos of daughters and others beloved.
Walls hung with a world of images
that speak your passion for this earth
and one another. There is room here for the silent tears
that slip from her lids when you go out
and she thinks no one is looking. Place for
the glad “Hey, you!” when you return;
For the tremor in our hands, voices.
Everywhere here the touch of intimacy and welcome,
a space into which no true stranger can come.
Even death has been prepared for with intention,
which becomes its utter defeat.

In the old story, they say the travelers
who followed the starlight
went home by a different way.
That’s what I want to do.
When I am not sure of the path
I think of her,
who gave to us both boldness
and the practice of resurrection.
Her clear voice reminds me: What is resurrection
if not the conviction that there is always
another path to travel home,
always a way to arrive--
wholehearted and intact--
no matter how shadowed the pass,
how cold the night,
how distant the star
riding the dark and unknown sky.

--Dee Dee Risher
January 6, 2005