Losses All Lead to Findings

for JBV

Getting lost is easier than it looks.
Nobody knows how hard it is to stay put
and remember the right directions
until the path stretches out across the map.
The path remains the same, still connecting
you to me, and me to you.
But it's a longer road to home than before.

So what I can't find in your arms
I try to make up for in conversation.
But when the nights grew long and the people
grew themselves bigger than compassion
I lost the momentum of speech.
I was alone on a foreign road.
I forgot who you were for a while.

But losses all lead to findings.
Tonight in the darkened cathedral,
where I painted away my own spiritual thirst,
all those strangers' sins were pressed into the floor
and washed up, scrubbed away, like a spill.
Those transgressions are insignificant flaws
on the wide carpet between us,
between two static hearts.

There was paint on my hands
and I stared at the ring on my finger
shining in the divine cathedral lighting.
I remembered who you were again.
The sin that made the man! The man
that was loved by a woman.
Oh, the woman that forgot the sin
that made the man she loved.

As the memory returns to me
the road grows shorter and you are
growing closer to me but it is never
going to be close enough.
All I can ever hope for is that
the next time I get lost,
you will be by my side.