The Last Supper

It was Mary, felled by grief, on her knees
in the dirt, who mistook a man newly risen
from the dead, the only man she'd ever really loved,
for a gardener: Sir,if you have carried him away,
she cried, tell me where you have laid him, and I
will take him away. So it's true: what we observe
sometimes betrays us. It was raining, heavily,

slowly, making the leaves of the silver ash
outside my window genuflect and bow down;
and the mirror on the dresser with its slender,
seductive dishonesty reflected
and carried into the room many things
from outside my field of vision: a few boats

approaching the hard, welcome arms
of the harbor, a short run of washing left hanging
in the garden next door, and the rain closing its lips
around the yellow flag and the fuchsia.
I'd always suspected the rain to be full

of such rooms and enclosures. I'd woken up jet-lagged
in the late afternoon in the thin bed I'd slept in
when I was a child; woken feeling sad and lonely
even though I was neither sad

nor lonely—that was just my old self, the past
and its various disguises. I'd been dreaming
about that poet in New York City who walks
through the busiest streets all day, recording,
in a spiral-bound, pocket-sized notebook, nothing
but the observable world. To do so, he said,
keeps him honest, and he is never seduced
by his own ideas. Strange, I'd always thought art
was a series of small deceptions
performed in the service of the truth—a collection
of lies, like a set of knives; that even the vigilant
among us give ourselves away by choosing
certain things over others. Already the rain

and the late afternoon were moving
toward that time of light when the quiet
benevolence that has watched us all day like a parent
turns away, and I knew I should be outside
walking, resisting any intimation of ending,
otherwise I'd feel abandoned all evening, otherwise
I'd fall back into sleep abandoned. But

it was almost dinnertime, and I was held
where I was by the music my mother made
striking her carillon of copper-bottomed saucepans,
by the breathy glide of drawer after drawer opening,
then closing, opening, then closing; by the galloping
of many knives across the marble cutting block.

During dinner my parents slipped
me what they insisted they could not finish: a thin
sheaf of salad greens, more garnish than meal,
boiled leeks and pork medallions, a few glazed,
sliced carrots, glowing like a handful of change.
Such provisioning, of course, was metaphorical:
it was simply my permission to finish
the journey without them. And what ruined
my heart was not the thinness

of my father's thighs, or the dark inlay
of veins around my mother's ankles;
it was not how they forgot things, or remembered
what had not yet happened. It was how little

they ate; it was the way my mother rallied
all day in the kitchen and then arrived at the table
with platters and great dishes that were always
almost empty. It was the way their portions

became lost in the vast, pale arenas of their plates.
If observing the world keeps us honest, what truths
do we glean watching a body we love
going into the ground? The body is both everything
and nothing.
It was the way they'd come to need so much
less of the world. And how this, perhaps, was enough.