Maximilian Heinegg: Believe Our Ashes

Maximilian Heinegg: Believe Our Ashes
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Cathedral

 

Florence, the blasted speakers I skimped on

distorted & I heard waves

instead of where    you cannot breathe, the ocean

a lover who never wanted to hear any prayer   

save its own.

 

As I drive in, your echo but an octave lower, I’m pulled

the way I imagine faith could be

followed, the way my love beckons

me into water where she’s assured, & I come to

 

believe our ashes will stay, here where she tells me

to pour them, if I have to hold their strange exhalation,

& again, this light will come through the stained

glass of the waves, our time together, the cathedral  

 

written in images so the faithful could read

when death was the secret everyone kept   

telling, my finger taps the hymnal to hear

            the impossible, never let me go.


Maximilian Heinegg's poems have appeared in Columbia Poetry Review, December Magazine, The Cortland Review, Crab Creek Review, and The American Journal of Poetry, among others. As a singer-songwriter, his records can be heard at www.maxheinegg.com   He lives and teaches English in Medford, MA.