For John II
Could anyone else spend four days
In Paradise and keep quiet about it?
Imagine Heaven as a Dolomite villa,
With a view of the snowy peaks,
A walk down the hills to the vineyards,
An evening with a beloved in a piazza,
Two am espresso and poetry in the only open café,
Asleep on a cloud like a tussled sheet and pillow,
But Heaven wasn’t ready for Lazarus:
Plain marble rooms for a deity;
Barracks for angels; bivouacs left by demons.
(The millennia of human memories — not yet unleashed
As icons by crusaders, martyrs, and your ordinary dead.)
Lazarus saw an empty Heaven waiting for its first Easter.
No one yet allowed to choose his next life, as swan or swami,
Leaving paradise behind like silenced footsteps and broken chains.
By day four, he was ready to come back.
The first person he saw was the Nazarene.
They stunk up the mausoleum, discarded the bandages,
Dined with his sisters, and frightened the Pharisees.
Dying once wasn’t enough for them.
They conspired like collaborators to an invasion
To identify and assassinate important Jews.
Lazarus became part of the diaspora.
Stories kept him alive
Long enough to find Cyprus and blend in.
It was hard to forsake instant celebrity,
And avoid the adoration of Arabs, Romans, and Greeks,
Condemned as a charlatan; compared to Iscariot hanged,
The only thing left for him, by the end, were his four days.
Each day longer than his second death bed.
Each day no longer on the tour.