Man Considered as a Three-Legged Stool

Poem

I visited my old friend, Kit,
in heaven: Saint Peter let
him through the door to join me outside.
‘Ten minutes,’ said the Saint. ‘No more.’

‘Thanks, mister,’ we said. ‘Thanks.’

I’d brought cigarettes.
He lit his from mine. For a time
we just smoked, companionably,
saying nothing, just looking down
the view’s visceral swoon — bright
fluid stars in the shimmering pool-blue
and below, very far, almost lost
in its depths, Earth like a beetle’s back
blue and green and black.

‘So,’ I said. ‘What’s it like?’
‘Good,’ he said, ‘it’s. Obviously it’s good.’
We laughed, both, nervy-like.
‘The thing is — deathhood:
it’s great, it really is. Obviously.’

‘Obviously.’

‘It’s just …’ He leaned against the wall.
Breathed a spear of smoke into the blue.
‘It’s just it’s all
threes.’ ‘Threes?’ ‘Threes.
Father, Son and Spirit is all the logic.
The principle. Thrinciple. Mystical.
Nine ranks of angels, all
with three sets of wings, three
ears, three eyes. Thrice three and three.
Even maths here is trinomial.
Fractions have three elements. Nothing’s
either-or.’ ‘And?’

He tossed his stub, ember-red, over the lip
to spin past the giant white-blue lights.

‘Look at me,’ he said. ‘Look at you.
Two arms, two legs, two eyes, two thoughts.
I don’t quite fit. I’m missing something.
It’s how He made me, how He wants it, but.

I’m out of kilter. My line’s not true.
It’s bliss that’s loss as well.
It’s how He made us, twos, twos,
three-legged-stools with a leg missing.
And black-whites, is-oughts,
Life, death, they don’t obtain.
I’m unrebuilt. I’m still mundane.
It’s not a complaint. But.’

‘Time,’ boomed the Saint.
‘Break’s over, chaps.’

Kit shook my hand, a touch solemn,
nodded, went back inside to a blare
of trumpets. I started down the big stair
grasping the rail.
Unsteady on my pins. But to slip there
would be a pretty catastrophic lapse
and days-worth of plummeting fall.