The Cathedral

By Kaitlyn Grissom

You offered a picnic; I had my suspicions.

I had my good sense and those grave inhibitions

Which had guided my life up to that very day

When the wind blew the last of the birch leaves away.

We had planned to go see off the last fires of fall

By the Japanese lake in the park, that was all.

Oh, if only I’d fathomed what was to befall!

I’m not sure what I thought of when I turned and said

That I knew of a place we could travel instead

If we parked by the dam and walked up to the hill

Where the road was untrodden, The air was so till

You could hear the trees talk, and the leaves hit the ground,

Or the voices of ghosts, if you made not a sound.

And you gave me a shrug, and I managed a nod,

And we climbed up the hill, and we talked about God.

And we talked about bypasses, ice cream, and hell,

And some things that I thought I was too scared to tell

To a soul, things I swore that though ages passed, never

Would I bare ‘till my gravestone had sealed them forever.

A high wind was so harsh that it rattled our bones.

‘Rain is coming’, I told you, ‘and we should go home,

But there by the old playground a shelter-house stands.’

So we went on our way, too afraid to hold hands.

I got lost a few times on my way ‘round the bend

When we talked like small children and walked like old men

And I laughed like a stone-skipping child again.

‘A cathedral’, I whispered, ‘Dear God, it’s a church.’

Overridden with weeds, but the poor dying birch-

Tree had spread its stained glass yellow arms to the sun

While we talked of the past and of things just begun.

And I don’t know what happened, what finally snapped,

But I lost my good conscience and now I’ve been trapped.

As if sent by the heavens to wash off my sin,

The great storm-clouds of autumn came thundering in

And the trees were all bare now, the quivering last

Ghosts of hope for my sanity fading out fast

And the laws that I built were a thing of the past.

We both started back down as a pair of young fools

Just kicking around in a bucket of broken rules.