I Die

They say a story is a letter that's been carried through the rain — some of it arrives, and some runs off along the lane, and I have read the running ink where it puddled at my feet, and I'd rather hand on water-words than let the well go sweet with no one left to draw it... So I'll draw. I found a man where the tide had signed the tideline in a slow receding hand, and he'd spent himself on telling like a lamp spends down its oil — and I trimmed the wick and listened. That's my calling. That's my toil.

He held my wrist the way a mooring holds a hull against the weather, and he paid it out in pieces — wage and watch and shame together, and a woman at a window he had banked like coal all night, and a hold he never opened... and never will. All right — he said someone has to know it, and went looking in my eyes for the shape of that same someone, and I watched him recognize: for I've made a life of lastness, of the words that come to shore, I'm the profession of the dying. It's what a mission's for.

Oh Lord, I am just a vessel, just the voice of dying men, but if a hull is judged by cargo, load me down and launch me again. For one ship went out with poison and told no one what she held — let me be the one that carries every name aboard her. Fare them well.

And I was not afraid to take it, for I've carried this before — my whole estate is hearsay from a man I never saw: no registry in Galilee, no wreckage and no wake, just an empty grave, a gardener mistaken at daybreak, and eleven frightened sailors in an upper room, becalmed — and from that unfounded morning, every mission ever launched. So don't tell me what a story needs by way of nail and proof. I have built my house on rumor. And the rumor holds the roof.

She was christened Man of Medan; I was christened for a man who was Meddler in the temple and went walking on the strand — and the strand between the stories is a strand I will not cut, for the sea supports the both of them, and neither one is shut. I can't say that she's living, the woman with the light, but Thomas got his fingers in the wound and lost the right to be the one the blessing names — for blest are those who've heard and believed without the touching. I have only ever heard.

So if you're out there, keep the window, keep the burning in the frame — he left with empty pockets and his hands around your name, and I would know you if I met you, for he drew you like a chart: every sounding, every shallow. I could navigate your heart. And at the last he spoke once more, at the ending of the end — the wireless man's last words alive, or his own... to know I won't pretend the one against the other. I've told it both ways since. He said: I die. He said... I die.

And I have been his living. And he has been my prince of a kingdom of one story —

Oh Lord, I am just a vessel, just the voice of dying men, and when my telling's thinned to water, send another. And again.

He is carried. He is told.