Maybe - Mary Oliver

[Lawrence Robinson]

Maybe

Sweet Jesus, talking
	his melancholy madness,
		stood up in the boat
			and the sea lay down,

silky and sorry.
	So everybody was saved
		that night
			But you know how it is
	
when something
	different crosses 
		the threshold -- the uncles
			mutter together,
	
the women walk away,
	the young brother begins
		to sharpen his knife.
			Nobody knows what the soul is.

It comes and goes
	like the wind over the water -- 
		sometimes, for days,
			you don't think of it.

Maybe, after the sermon,
	after the multitude was fed,
		one or two of them felt
			the soul slip forth

like a tremor of pure sunlight,
	before exhaustion,
		that wants to swallow everything,
			gripped their bones and left them 

miserable and sleepy;
	as they are now, forgetting
		how the wind tore at the sails
			before he rose and talked to it --

tender and luminous and demanding
	as he always was--
		a thousand times more frightening
			than the killer sea.


				- Mary Oliver
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