Elegy for the Man Who Climbed

I have walked so long in the low rooms
that I forgot the ceiling could be sky,
forgot that fire is not the only weather
a body learns to live in.

Down there, the years burned without consuming,
the way grief burns, patient, thorough, never finishing the job
so it can start again tomorrow.
I learned the names of every flame.
I called them brother.

Someone told me once there was a stair.
I didn't believe it, the way you stop believing
in doors after enough nights of finding only walls.
But my feet, being older than my faith,
kept climbing anyway, counting steps I couldn't see,
each one cooler than the last,
each one a small mercy
I was too tired to thank.

Now I stand somewhere between,
not hell, not yet heaven,
in a corridor made of grey light
where all my old fires
sit folded on the floor like coats
I'm not sure I'm allowed to leave behind.

They say heaven forgets the smell of smoke.
I don't know if I want it to.
Some of what burned in me was mine,
was, in its ruined way, a kind of love.

If I make it all the way up,
I will carry a little ash in my pocket, just enough
to remember the man who climbed.