Now a certain man was sick, named Lazarus, of Bethany, the town of Mary and   
                              her sister Martha. 


So I think of those days before the Healer 
came and changed it all—

how the sisters must have sat with Lazarus 
in the house his hands had built for them. 

How they held his hand. And the last hours 
when he drifted there, a ruined man. 

His dreary, dreamy sleep—
and how they spoke together of all 

they could recall: particular days that seemed lit 
within. Cries of a child playing outside.

Skies turning blue, then gray, then bright.
A garden he’d wanted to plant again.

All of it fading. Made, unmade, and made once more.
Have a little broth, brother, one of them said.

Let us sing for you those songs of loss—
Consider their nights’ long lineage:

how the sisters tried to help him see what might 
come next: mitzrayim, they called it, the narrow place—

and in all the paintings we have of him,
Lazarus is shrouded in the grave-cloths his sisters 

surely made. Strips of linen envelope him—
so I remember a woman who showed me how

she bleached and boiled strips of cotton cloth,
like those the sisters made. And how she laid

them out to dry in what she called the bandage room—
a narrow place—

and how she wrapped, each morning, the leg
of her beloved, pausing, always,

with tender care at the spot in his flesh
where the illness first had bloomed.

Think of the long lineage of her days and nights.
Consider the miracle: days and nights she gives to him.