Outside the wind has risen, and here away from town, and near the sea, it seems to have risen with no uncertain fury, so the joints and timbers of the old converted barn that I call home creak and crack (again) like a frail ship on a muscular sea. Was it the louder-than-howling air as it raked the corners of my home… ? Or was it the bold report of an old nail, as it lost its hold and ceded ground in the invisible current’s grip, that shook me and took me out of my dreams? The first assault just brushed the fog of sleep; the second rush illuminated it, a shock of lightning, or the flash of a harbor-light; while the last, most recent, burned it quite away, and left me standing, slightly muddled, softly cursing, wrapping cloth around to warm me at the very deepest bottom of the night.

It’s not who she is that begs the lyric; not what he wants that’s the melody’s thread. Instead: when something stirs and merges one and one; makes failing math, is short two by a half; when boundaries gently blur; when bodies move without one saying stay, one saying go…

There is Music’s spring, if not the spring of everything.

Or, what I mean: it’s where the spirits meet that fuels the fire; it’s where they part that puts it out.

One pillar was just within reach. Stretching her hand, the tips of her fingers ran over the smooth and the rough of the mosaic surface, each square inch of glazed ceramic a work of art in itself, each line of mortar its frame. – If I stood here a month I might see them all, she thought. As though walking the Louvre without walking.

She glanced down the long chamber. The sun was falling, and the far end of the hall was already dark, in the expanse the other columns were like trees, somehow solemn (was that her feeling, written into the dusk?), lifting a painted canopy overhead, lifting history overhead, roots buried in centuries of shuffling feet, branches hidden in an incense haze.

… at the brow of the hill was a stone wall, a dun crown, and at its heel, a trail; from heel to brow the wander walked, pacing the arc the sun traced in the sky

… at noon, the world stands at height; as if light were a special calling, a luminous gravity pulling heaven- not earth- toward, where all laid low by night’s endeavors are plucked up, tugged on strings and streamers, to momentary magnificence; I… I AM! the shout of every Thing come noon, arises in its native tongue

She covered her face with her hands as though to stop the tears that flowed, as though to hide her love from the world, as though to keep it from pouring out.

There (she thinks): the equation’s made: a drop of water squeezed from the heart has the same weight as a drop of love.

It’s the physics of desire. It’s the energy of drawing close, it’s the heat of attachment, the matter of bodies and births, the motion of collision and embrace, of merging and deflecting. Watch the ghost-trace particles: bodies find each other and spin away. Yet their energy is conserved: nothing disappears (she thinks): the hum of what is given and received, becomes a song, a sigh, a cry.

I

At the sliding glass door she stood, looking at the night. Through her own reflection she could see, in order of diminishing certainty, the branches of a pine, the outline of flowers along the walk (in shades of gray), lawn that faded into the darkness of what she knew to be a road. When she breathed in there was a faint whistling through her nostrils; when she breathed out, her breath fogged the glass in an oval that grew outward, then shrunk on itself, as though its shape were being drawn back into her lungs. The hall tiles were cold. She looked down at her feet.

Leaning back into the sofa, the leather cushions gave themselves to her head and neck, like two hands receiving, gently laying her down. She drew a full breath, exhaled part of the day, and her limbs relaxed. When I close my eyes, this parade, she thinks. Parade or surrealist painting.

That beautiful girl in my arms, five hours old. Light as impossibility; heavy as my hands rose to meet her. Small as my hands’ cradle; large as my heart’s opening. She crawled inside me and slept there for days and days.

– What if…

She opened a drawer in the kitchen, the one beneath the silver that held everything and nothing, like a purse, and dug about for a moment. She was sure it was there, just the sort of thing she would never throw out, and would never use. Half-empty blocks of twist-ties, a few clothes pins, the dull pair of scissors whose blades were loose, two corks, cheesecloth, three batteries as many years old (she took these in her hand). Her fingers reached deeper than the drawer would open, and aha! found the sticky-soft edge of a candle-stub lined up against the back wall, where the tide of shifting objects had rolled it and left it. She lifted it out, and closed the drawer.

Someone knocked. It’s 4:30 AM. The entire local Earth is muffled by a foot of snow so even cars (should they pass by) hush by. Every creature sleeps or is silent, winged predation, or a predator’s intent. One of my cats is a small sandbag across my ankle, the nocturnal knocked out of him. The furnace hums, that’s all: almost inaudible, slightly super-liminal drone. Nothing moves, and nearly-nothing makes nearly-no-sound.

Certain roles warrant mention, and those that play them, however often in the wings, deserve to step forward and take a bow. Once upon a time there was a little girl… not the first girl nor the first time, but let us say the first this time ‘round. The first First Tooth, the first one following; the first one loose, the first one falling. And what does that mean? Is a fallen tooth like a fallen leaf? Is it a hole that lets a whistle through? A space for a straw (for now)?