- Thought 1 -

Spring has come as a surprise, as winter was a surprise, and the rains of the past few days have cured the branches of their buds, the leaves unfurling themselves, gladly, green skin to the warm sun that followed when the clouds fled.

Leaves whispers to me: the garden is late. I could turn the soil… but then, it would be an empty bed. With you, it would be a harvest plan. I could sow seeds… but then, only plants would come up. If you were here, there’d be fruit instead.

What was the greatest gift I received, through my years living in Brazil? Was it perspective on our own nation, and my place in it? Was it the sights and sounds and flavors of the Other, of another portion of our planet, one physically quite as large as the continental United States? Was it the friendships, the loves, my children born there (as if to two mothers), the great efforts, the greater successes, the greatness of the failures?

Ocean’s Edge - Mark Schultz

I

The city spread below me jeweled by the night its soft stars lit-a-million among the sleeping and awake coursed on broadening avenues like a watershed of light that pulsed and pooled and called all divers in

I descended from the western hills leaning as I traveled toward that ocean’s edge then waded into the huddled multitude dry from my mountain-far retreat

What would I find? Not wind - not silence of the mind but a certain spinning revelry a dance of hopes and veiled unveiled desire

Isabela has always been early.

At our favorite Italian restaurant, on the main road between Menino Deus and Cidade Baixo – the former, a lower-middle-class neighborhood where we had first lived when we arrived in the city; the latter, an area of town which was like urban foothills to the buzzing downtown peaks – Júlia and I had conspired to have a Last Dinner, a little planned celebration before the next morning’s planned arrival, via c-section, of our daughter.

Entre eu e eu há fronteiras que apenas o tempo cruza

e tu lado de lá esperando alguém.

Te vejo banhada na nudez da manhã escondida por fumaça por desejo revelada teu botão querendo desabrochar sem terra.

Entre tu e tu a fronteira que se cruza por abraçar a dor:

assim banhado pelo sal das lágrimas o raís abre vão na terra fecunda penetra o escuro úmido para acabar com sede.

My mother believes in me so the odds bow more to my favor. She guards a heart she carries through life like a basket filling with flowers she doesn’t know are hers.

Love also believes in me. She holds the opening key to my houses and turns in at my door and sits on my bed and waits for my fear to grow tired. If I touched her like an heirloom glass… or as I lift bread from the oven… or as rain covers the ocean… but I have cursed my hands with the ten doubts of the Christians and often they are coarse as sand or still as basalt. Though when she sees me, she smiles.

a snowflake fell through light as light as breath depends on this our sky our night	light as the sound as a breath is caught suspended by a thread from the vault of our sky	the world waited as I waited as I watched watched as the light crystal descended from the end of our night	and the world shook! as the flake as slight as thought alit lit up vanished into heat in the light in the palm of my hand

A Snowflake - Mark Schultz

I would have told the secrets of my life long ago but there were none: life is simple like a house of four walls and only one door through which you enter and leave. That house braced against erosion that house weighing its foundation a long way from the sea; the house that wishes to be dismantled wishes to burn down in the night or find blood on the floor; wishes a man would enter and sleep and another man, quite different, wake and depart.

Some years ago – after the months in Indonesia, after working with the small publishing house, after co-managing the restaurant; before Brazil, before children, before hi-tech consulting – I helped start a small organic vegetable farm in Glencoe, Minnesota. It was the most trying and most wonderful experience. Hours of labor in the prairie sun that at once broke my body and built it up, found me falling into bed as though stunned, waking refreshed as though called out by the fields and the birds. Distant from neighbors and from community, close to life and spirit.