And soon, yes, they ll be marching triumphantly past the graveyard, cymbals like offering plates at their hips, the old spiritual clanging the neighborhood, saxophones and trumpets blasting the last doubts from our ears. Of course, we will follow, stiff in our nightshirts, too human for holiness but hungry enough to shadow their sanctified sufferings, genuflect with them in the cold gothic arch of the cathedral where, with the canonized, we will feast greedily on the Body and Blood. We stack the dead names of the faithful high in the incensed air, light prayers beneath them till the altar burns with words. The nave knows their smoke, remembers our memories of them. The chancel recants our absence from their lives until we live again in the space at the rail beside them, these saints unSainted, the faint flames of our unmartyred selves riding their iridescent fires.
Nothing is until it s gone.
On that gray day we graved her down the long black hills to dark seas where dead colors run.