Trespasses

your voice still carries an insistent whisper, close to my ear

Photo: © David Whyte

Trespasses

For John O'Donohue

Your presence is the invitational mystery
it always was, a half-disappearance
even when you lived and breathed
and walked beside us in the lighted day.

You were here and gone as much then
as you are now except the door
will never open now to see you enter
and call out loud in the way you could,

though your voice still carries
an insistent whisper, close to my ear.
I dreamt the other night I was in some
divine and ordinary classroom

explaining your whole life to you,
the one you had lived, everything
you had done, all you had written,
everyone you had touched,

when you turned to me
and took me by the shoulder
and looked into my eyes
and laughed in realization, saying,

and you were a good friend to me weren’t you?
And I woke up with tears in my eyes, as if
to dream more would presume upon the new life
that had asked you, so suddenly to leave this one.

Did I know you even before I met you?
Are first meetings some frontier
already existing in the world
to which both are invited

and without which
neither could have existed?
Friendship abides through
mutual and repeated forgiveness

and we were brought to forgive again
and again, letters, phone calls, the difficulties
of closeness and distance—the wrong word
about the right word—but forgive we always did

as we had to, our trespasses against each other
transfigured in the end by the endless meal,
the filled glass, an accolade, a laugh or an exclamation,
the hands extended, high above the table,

and like our eyes, firmly locked together,
as if to say, There is something we do not know
about the way we were sent as companion voices
to walk this world, together or apart.

But your death strained the sinews of
that bond again and left me helpless
to know how fully to forgive your going
when I had not yet fully forgiven you.

I write this then to set the table for us both,
to lay out glasses, full plates, to pour the wine, to
     laugh
and cry out loud as we did. Shake hands now,
I’ll give you your death if you give me mine.


--from Pilgrim

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