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Athens
RON OVERTON
HEAVEN
I'm sitting here at the memorial service
for my uncle, who was a good man and
lived fully to ninety-five, which allows me
to look out the window as the world goes on,
and I think of the time I worked in Bermuda
and went every Sunday of my twentieth summer
to the high, stone cathedral next door.
There was something grand and remote
about the Anglican formality-I had been raised
in the red hot fear of hellfire and brimstone.
But what I remember most were the peaked windows,
one on each side of the altar, clear and open
so that all you could see were water and sky,
the line between them vague, blurred, irrelevant.
There was no stained glass.
(Sometimes art gets in the way.)
I don't know when to stand or when to sit down
I said to my friend. Just go with the tide,
he smiled, and the figure seemed right
as I watched the sky brighten to a noon intensity
possible only on islands far offshore,
and the moment stood almost still in that light
and seemed as endless as the sea,
which is not endless,
seemed as endless as the summer sky, which is,
or seems to us to be, until it washes up
against the shores of God.