It is wonderful to sit out the sleepless night, which the fire of anger has lit! Like watching the full moon rise over a lake, or sun ignite the ocean: a little light comes, then more and more, until a new whole landscape is revealed, in spite of yourself.

In the case of rolling and turning in your covers, your sheets tying you in a knot, or if not your sheets, your thoughts: when you have practiced the art of watching, and watching becomes a habit as opposed to effort… then the mind’s parade, illuminated, entertains, exasperates, troubles, triumphs. A blaring, dancing dream of possibility and otherworldliness, each idea capers in, accompanied with sense, each sense cradled in a rivulet of heat, at its heart an explosive charge: as one draws near its features clarify and colors smear, its sweat and power reek and roil, its face approaches, flares, then rears and turns away; another steers into your line of wonder, blunders into this and that, falls flat, lifts itself and shivers dust motes from its hat, winks, and thunders past; the smallest steps so softly it’s a whisper in the din, imagines invisibility and it within, its sound is thin, as if to hold it would draw finger into thumb, then what have you, what have you; a great volume of water crashes to the ground!; a paper figure passes, flicks your finger, catches tinder, touches flame to each encounter, makes a word a cinder, becomes a sheet of little substance, if it holds you leaves you empty, more crashes, this time ashes; then the brass; then drums; then drumming heels; then humming ears; echoes like ghostly fears; empty tears; farewells; stories left to tell; quelling; quiet; quit.

Lately I have neither composed melody nor lyric, because music, however you follow its fragrance, requires the flower. Simple or complex, the blossom must open, the color be expressive and expressed: if that bud is all-potential, then the hand must wait for later summer, for more sun, for rain; and if the petals have stretched, dried and fallen, then the mind must imagine flowers, and the tongue will wait for spring. Either way, an absence makes the heart redundant, the song oblique, a tangent, and all attempts to coax it hither are nothing less than calling butterflies from the sky, with similar result.

My cats, of course, obey another set of spheres, and while I quiet into the solitude and the slightly muffled end of the day (even the blue TV glare has left the neighbor-houses, and the most convicted night birds have for the most part decided that sleep is good enough) as I write a few lines as exercise, or as a ladle dipped into the Well, my friendly, black, male cat, Shadow, has wandered into the influence of the front door, guttering a deep and slightly swallowed yowl, the one I have come to recognize, in the language of cats, as being a call to his mate (platonic though their mating is, no less Love, ranging to if not attaining the coital: embracing the familial, the time-worn, the touch-comforted and the understood), his call announcing Success in the Hunt, as evidenced by the flesh of a creature smaller and less offensively appointed than himself, and accustomed as a species to being prey, now prey again, a rabbit.

“Pois, deus virou vida, assim mesmo: virou gramado, virou ar, foi respirado, e apenas então aprendeu perder…”

“Não diga.” Meio-sorriso, rosto virado para que desconfiança seja oculta, perdida na sombra.

“Digo, sim, querida. Digo sim. As terras foram secas, os lagos apenas buracos no pele da planeta, ocávo, esperando…” Mas não quis saber. Oferecí água; não quis saber. “Deus tinha o meu rosto, e o teu. Olho para olho, alma a alma, e o deserto entre os dois. Aprendia perder, sim. Não acreditas?”

“Waiting is work.”

My father, on the telephone, waits for the return of my mother, away in Sweden. One fills her eyes with her history and with the world; one fills his eyes with the familiar and with a brief emptiness.

But a small emptiness echoes the greater one, just as a shadow in the sun is kin to those of the evening, those of night. And absence that ends reminds the heart that lives that there is an absence which lingers, lengthens, and deepens with the days.

"
Mountains did look in
the windows of the thin aluminum room
over loud tar paper roofs
We could see how
peaks
covered with lime or snow
backed away
a little wounded
from their literal distance
" - Mary Kinzie

I wondered, tonight, as the full moon flooded my room as it flooded the landscape around me, as it flooded the night from one limb of the horizon to the other, how it is that words describe the darkness so easily, while the light can be elusive as a star in the evening fog?

In many conversations over the years I have found myself planted on one side of a fence, leaning in, looking over. And according to my companion’s words – through words thoughts, in thoughts timber, trimmed timber rails, rails become fences, fences framed vision, in pictures a mirror of one’s Self – there was a way of being that was correct, a way of being that was incorrect. There was – is -- one practice which brings you to wholeness, one God (as it were) telling you the way to walk most clearly, telling you what to do and what not to do, in words shaped by your mouth and in commandments shaped by your mind.

A phrase often heard in physical training programs, from triathletes to bicyclists to climbers to yogis, is “working your edge.” No matter what level of experience we have attained in a given sport, there is always a level of activity or mental acuity beyond that which we are familiar. There is always a more open or more human experience waiting, just outside of our comfort zone. Sometimes the highest experience is far outside that comfort zone, in fact.

Better to travel with someone who is looking for God
than with someone who has found him.

Today unlike other Thanksgiving holidays I find myself alone. The day began in silence, shrouded in fog from the eastern seaboard; it passed quietly in a town whose shopdoors shut tightly against profit and house doors opened wide in favor of family; and ended in fog from the eastern seaboard, backlit in a dusty red, dusky purple, then dark.

There was no turkey except for those roaming the wood behind my house, and no stuffing or potatoes or pie. There was, in fact, nothing special whatsoever, except for this contrast of need (a darker color?) to necessity (a pure white sheet).