It's Still Life

Liturgy for His Return, Cagnes-sur-Mer
(Summer 1842 — Where the road remembers him)

I. The Hill That Has Grown Steeper
I found the hill steeper than I remembered,
or else I had brought back
less of myself than I meant to.

This is what a year does.
This is what the navy does.
This is what it means
to be carried away by a war
you did not choose,

to be conscripted into service
by a country that does not know your name.

The stick bites the dust before me.
Then my bad leg.
Then the other.
And so I come up between the olive trees
in a heat so white
it seems the sky
has forgotten how to hold colour.

II. The Road That Memory Misremembered
I have thought often enough of this road
to mistrust it,
because memory is a flowery liar,
and I have lied to myself
every day for a year:
I will see her tomorrow.
I will write to her.
I will find a way
to tell her I am still alive.

But the house stands where it should.
Shutters half-drawn against the afternoon.
Stones at the verge
giving back the same dry light
they gave the day I left.

The road is real.
The house is real.
And if she is still in it,
then everything I told myself
was not a lie—
only a waiting that has finally ended.

III. The Uniform That Precedes Him
The coat on my back
still carries the navy’s cut—
the little authority of it,
the sharp lines,
the buttons that have been polished
by hands that did not love me.

But salt, sun, and service
have worn its pride thin.
The coat is a costume now,
a shell that no longer fits
the man I was before I left.

I feel again
what I felt in every port worth fearing:
that a uniform arrives before the man inside it does,
that they see the coat first,
the rank,
the role,
the soldier who is not quite a soldier.

But she,
she will see the man.

IV. The Sight of Her at the Door
Then I see her at the door,
small at that distance,
still as if listening rather than looking.

She is not running toward me.
She is not waving.
She is waiting…
as she has waited for a year,
as she has waited in the stone cottage,
as she has waited through winter and spring
and the long, blank summer of my absence.

I take one step.
Then another.
And I understand nothing
except that I must not fall
before I reach her.

Not because I am proud.
Not because I am strong.
But because she has waited too long
to watch me collapse
in the dust of our own threshold.

V. The Limp That Precedes the Face
If she knows me by my limp before my face,
I cannot blame her.

I have come home altered.
The leg is not what it was.
The body is not what it was.
The man is not what he was.

But home,
in its mercy,
has chosen to wait.

Not the cottage.
Not the road.
Not the hills or the olive trees.
Home,
the place that bears her name,
the place that is her face,
the place that is her voice
speaking my name
after so many months of silence.

VI. For Those Who Return
See the hill that was steeper than you remembered.
See the stick that bit the dust for you.
See the uniform that precedes you
and the limp that announces you.

Believe the sight of her at the door,
small, still, listening rather than looking,
waiting rather than running,
believing even when belief was foolish.

Thank the road that brought you home.
Thank the house that stood where it should.
Bless the mercy of home,
which does not ask
what you have become,
only that you have returned.

And bless Felreil,
who found the hill steeper,
who brought back less of himself,
who understood that a uniform is not a man,
that a limp is not a failure,
that home is not a place,
it is a face waiting in a doorway
to welcome you back
into the story
where you have always belonged.

He is home.
She is home.
The end is not an ending.
It is a beginning
that has been waiting
for this moment
to arrive.