The Hollow Vow…

The chapel keeps its door ajar
for nobody. Lime dust and cold
stone ribs hold up a roof
that long ago forgot the weight of prayer,
and every footfall I make
comes back to me
a half-beat late, uncertain,
like a name called in a language
no one here still speaks.

Outside, the forest has been patient
for three thousand years.
Plane trees, olive, fig, 
the plane trees most of all,
their silver bark peeled back
to show the bare and shining arm beneath,
their hearts eaten out by weather
and by time, and still
they stand.

I put my palm into a hollow trunk
and the hollow is warm,
and the hollow is not a wound.
Somewhere above me a crown of leaves
is loud with its own green work,
sap climbing the outside of the nothing
like a rope thrown up a well
and pulled, and pulled.

So the empty room and the empty tree
lean toward each other
across the path
like two old women
comparing their thin wrists.

Look how they thrive, the emptied things.
The chapel rings. The trunk holds up the sky.
Neither has asked to be filled.
Neither has asked to be forgiven
for the space it makes.

And I, who came here carrying
a chest full of furniture,
stand in the echo and the shade
and learn the harder architecture:
to keep the door ajar,
to let the wind go through,
to be a house with the roof gone
and the birds still coming,
to be a tree with a warm dark inside
and light on every leaf.