After Anne Carson

Day after day the mountain of the most high

received its fair share of worshipers,

and on each grove, there was a wooden cross,

a small hut, an incense shaker to provoke

the nose of God. I have travelled here,

a pilgrim of my own making,

and before my solitude was a bottle of olive oil,

a broken egg, the old skin of a snake

as if to say, I have given up my old life —

On the third day the gates to the kingdom

of good hope were flung open,

and all I could see was the tree of tragedy,

and the shrubs that were the climax of our lives.

Was it fair to know the end before my life had begun?

Sometimes the beauty of desire is in its longing,

and all prophecies in the end are boring.

The road down the mountain was a wreck,

and coming down, all I thought about was the loss

of my own faith, the chattering of winds,

the leaves from a tree that has begun to wither.

O the light of that world that lies on the precipice

of disbelieve, give me back my old faith,

including its old blindness, and the fragmented

light that was always falling at the end

of a tunnel too far away to call hope.