NOLI ME TANGERE

   …when we touch/ we enter touch entirely. No one’s alone.
  Anne Sexton, “The Truth the Dead Know”

The crack at the edge of the entrance stone
is like a filament of awareness, right at the cusp
where it burns itself out. Day, night, day again. Night.

You wait. You do not pray because you cannot pray. 
You can as a thing only lay where you’ve been laid, 
a slick of oil daubed onto your forehead for luck 

wicking itself into the linen. The filament flickering, 
trying to go out. Not trying, really. Just going out. There 
were signs. A kiss under the abiding olive trees. 

A woman who had held seven different demons inside 
the well of her mind, each one a wish that she hadn’t
thought to ask, arriving there to be apostle to the apostles

who loved only suffering. Who, like you, were fishers 
of men, untouched and untouchable in any version of this 
that gets told. The air that seeps in is dusted with pollen 

and a scent like myrrh or prophecy or whatever unwashed
dream plays the part. Mostly, though, with nothing much at all, 
like the rumored hollow bones of angels, made so that like 

raptors their wings can lift and carry away. Let vacancy tell 
its story in its own way, as a palimpsest of every other story 
of miracles scribbled on scroll and tablet and funerary wall. 

An empty slab is its own kind of weather, astonishing and ruinous, 
sprinkled invisibly with skin cells. Touch me not, O touch me not. 
Death is an obligation, beloved one, not a victory. It is a failure 

in how we know the world. We are born, we die, we rise again, 
like pollen drifted from the flowers called everlasting, immortelle, 
and strawflower, insistent on being, like them, our own way back. 

To see is to believe, but to touch is a potter’s field of consequences, 
filled with all we’ve tried to forget. What you’ve learned is that you 
are never alone and so very alone, shaking with a cold that stiffens 

every stalk and hollow, wondering at how they always know what 
they want from this world, how you have come to stand here 
again in this heartbreaking light just so they can have it.

–John Blair

John Blair’s seventh book, The Shape of Things to Come, was published last fall by Gival Press.