Lazarus — DOOMWRIGHT

Roll the stone and hang the garlands Pour for the returned Three days dead — tri dnya — and risen Let the lamps be burned He sits where honor seats him In linen from the grave He eats a little. Speaks of nothing. Watches like a cave Something came back with him Or something stayed below The feast goes on around a silence The wine's forgotten how to flow Something came back with him The flutes have left the song The guests look anywhere but forward The night is very long

The vintner looked — and left the presses The harvest rots in rows He says the wine will come to nothing As everything he knows The bridegroom looked — and told his bride There is no use in vows Not cruelly. Kindly. Like the weather. He watches sunsets now Those who looked Put nothing down and nothing forward The wells still hold their water No one lowers rope Those who looked Sit facing where the light goes Not dead. Not living. Waiting. And none of them know for what

She came when the last had left him With bread and with a comb She washed the tomb out of his linen And called the silence home She looked — the way the others looked — Into the standing night And did not fall toward the nothing She held it, and held tight Nevesta — the bride of what returned Keeps a lamp the dark can't answer Whatever hollowed all the others Found one room it could not enter

Marble knows me — I am Aurelius Rome stands where I have stood I'll see this famous emptiness And carve it into good He sat with him from dusk to sunrise The risen never spoke And what I met inside that looking No chisel has revoked My hands still know their mastery The stone still takes my will But form is a report from somewhere That I no longer feel They found a shapeless mass in marble And in it, wings askew A marvelous crooked butterfly — The truest thing I knew

Bring him garlanded like triumph Dress the horror as a guest Rome has swallowed gods before him Rome digests Look at me, then, three-days-dead — I am the roads, the wheat, the law A hundred nations hold my gaze up I have looked on war I saw the end of every empire The boundless dark that does not hate It simply waits — and I said: people. I said: Rome. I held the gate He cannot die — death knows him Killing pays the void its wage Take iron from the brazier And close the gaze

The desert took him back As deserts take a stone The dark behind his burned-out eyes At last looked like his own And every dusk he rises And walks against the west Hands out before him, stumbling Toward the light he cannot — Come, then, Lazarus. K solntsu. I am the one that never looked away Three days you kept. I keep forever. Walk. There is no further debt to pay