Build your life on white, on silence and on stillness.

It is quite a distance: my childhood to the prison where you are no longer.

It was explained to me that, for a time, you lived there.

What you did there was not living.

What you were there,
or here, or anywhere, you are no longer.

Wide mouth of the faucet shrieking white.
White onion. Two white onions.

White porcelain dishes atop white linen on the floor.

We are eating a fine meal of what remains of you.

You, who light the evening of this life.

Tonight it is the white dove who you loved.

Her cooing assuring me that you— if only, for a little while— were…

That is, you— if only, for a little while—were. You were.

Or so, I tell myself. Hope dirtying my fingers.

I am always bartering for what others mouth against:
all that I cannot remember. But the oil is fragrant.

So, I beg.

White stars. Their dead shine brighter.

It cannot be your face I remember.

White kleenex worn like a veil on the playground. White bouquet
of vows so freshly plucked the roots pulsed green.

What did I promise then?

To write out of faith. To write faithlessly.

A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
/ with no expression, nothing to express.

I do. I do.

White, then, a benevolence, that offered quiet. Turning to the page,
that is this life. To begin again.

It is quite a distance: from here to the time when you and I will meet.

Can be measured by your palm dreading worship down your back
on a Sunday.

And how sorrow makes me prophetic. White albumen ringing the eye.

Measured by this or other revolutions.

To there, I am being led by a horn.
As sweetly as Israfil’s. As obliquely as Pharoah’s.

For that time, I am making my hands full.
With what I collect, I could play a fugue.

             A benevolence.
                                                                    To begin again.

I look. Everywhere the world is bare bright / bone white.

It’s like creating the world all over again.

This grief for you. Where to put it. How to spell it.

                                                                    To begin again.

On the floor, a fine meal. For the final time
who touched you? Even the white linen is silent.

White circles of devotion in the air; I am always trying to catch her:
the dove who loved you.

If not her, then I want to catch her white feathered refrain.

If not her white feathered refrain, then the life I see
through the white egg shell I am holding to the light.

If not that life, then the light.

If not you. If not yet you, then… then. I want then.

But when my hands come together, it’s no cage I make.

Only more doves.

Slowly the white dream wrestles to life.

                                                                               begin

We are no longer waiting for you to come home.

Added:                                                                                           again.

We are waiting to join you.

*The italicized lines are from the following writers: Robert Bresson, Robert Frost, Etheridge Knight, and Kamau Braithwaite. The line, “How sorrow makes me prophetic. White albumen ringing the eye,” is an allusion to the lamenting of Prophet Yaqub in the Qur’an (“He turns away from them, lamenting, “Alas, poor Yusuf!” and his eyes turned white out of the sorrow he suppressed.”).