Agape

The night you died, I dreamed you came to camp to hear confession from an Eagle Scout tortured by forty years of sin and doubt. You whispered vespers by a hissing lamp. Handlers, allowing you to hike with me, followed us to the Bad Axe waterfront down a firebreak this camper used to hunt. Through all I said you suffered silently. I blamed the authors of my unbelief: St. Paul, who would have deemed my love obscene, the Jesuit who raped me as a teen, the altar boy when I was six, the grief of a child chucked from Eden, left for dead by Peter’s Church and all the choirs above. In a thick Polish accent choked with love,