Chaplain
by Kathy Nelson
From the next room, a roaring crowd, pounding drums:
football on TV and five of them (picture balding heads,
elbows on knees, a huddle of brothers on the sofa).
But here, a silence of light spreads across the white sheet,
Kathryn’s hands, like the last dry oak leaves fallen on snow.
Kathryn, our names the same. I love that we share a name.
Paul said, For now we see through a glass, darkly,
but then face to face. First Century Roman windows—
sunlight faint as a candle. Kathryn’s eyes dull, unfocused.
As a girl I envied Paul, light-blinded, the road to Damascus.
From the next room, stifled shouts or groans, depending.
Only wavering shadows were visible through Roman glass.
She barely breathes. Through a glass darkly, but then
face to face. The dry leaves of her hands on the sheet;
I love that we share a name. No longer able to sustain
the silence, I speak: Kathryn, I’m here, the chaplain.
Drawing back her gaze from wherever she has been,
she takes me, with her eyes, into that brilliant blaze.
Kathy Nelson, 2019 recipient of the James Dickey Prize (Five Points), is a graduate of the Warren Wilson Program for Writers. Find her work in her chapbooks, Cattails and Whose Names Have Slipped Away, and in LEON Literary Journal, New Ohio Review, Tar River Poetry, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and elsewhere.
