Afterwards, someone will take these words and make them sing the way you can’t.

I am just a scribe, the one who trails in your wake to scratch the parchment and make record. They will say of me that my theology influenced the story. They will say that I am a liar like Homer, like Ovid, that it all sprang from my mind, all fiction, all creation of my own doing. I am not next to Godliness, there is no divinity in me. This you can have as a disclaimer.

You’re writing from your dark room, feet dipped in half-developed photographs. One by one these crowded pages have each slipped into the bath. They throw their words back, wrap their ink around your ankles. They form dark clouds to warp your beautiful, youthful faces. He won’t believe you if you say this is nothing like drowning

but you’ve no faith he’s not a minor prophet. Kisses fall like dead languages against temples, glances marring your bare shoulders. You’re writing to say you’re packing it all in, returning the body that could not sustain you. Dye your hair again, drive out the stale smell of sex, burn your incense. Your constitution was never fit to be Christian

but you don’t need oracles to tell you that, you’ve always paraded your antlers like you desired them. You’re writing litanies, petitioning your own skin. You whisper prayers that you’ll never need to write for love again, that he will never come with praise on his lips. You will learn the wisdom never to be a psalmist. Breach the water, surface, cry out, breathe.

I will pen whatever you decreed to be honesty, line the pages with gold as if it might take the ugliness out of the verse. We will all become mythology, even insignificant me. When they bend to wash your son’s feet, they will whisper that yours were webbed. Later on, they will all sing his father’s songs by their multitudes, most beautiful worship

and your singular advice, your one proverb, relegated to an obscure book, unread.