Selvedge

We hear so much about the healing, but I want to know
about after the miracle, when everyone else has gone home.
The shape of the blankets left behind the body. The woman
who comes to shake them out and make the bed, her arms
strong from lifting the body that now walks. Eat, she said—
for years—eat, carrying tray after tray into the room where
she sat to rub the slackened muscles, bringing the blood there.
Why isn’t she the miracle? And those sisters in the kitchen,
banging around the pots, the spoons with a joy they’d never
felt before. Joy a new word in this world that could bring
what they loved back. Behind every resurrection: dailiness.
The woman kneeling in the dark on the third day. In her lap,
the linen she had woven and wrapped him in. Now, threads
hardened red with old god-blood. She made that cloth in her hands.