-- The wind swept north and as the weather lifted, my spirit lifted, as though cloud held the weight of me, and sun held the lightness. Is it that easy? A wind? I wanted to believe it was heartache, it was joy brewing in my heart; but maybe heartache and joy are related to weather in the same way the setting of fruit or wheat’s harvest or a flower opening or wilting are related. The sky calls, the heart answers, whether the heart of a man or of an apple or of a grain or of the stamen.

“The curve of the river is where the breeze comes freshest. You can hear the leaves find voice before each gust arrives, like an invisible wave reaching upstream, downstream. On this bank is the small shore, because the arm of water hooks around us here, an embrace. The far bank is the long shore: from here you can see it’s slow progress.

“I come to think. Sometimes I come here not to think. The place seems not to mind the face I put on, at any rate whatever face I brought is put away soon enough. So long as you’re quiet, the small sounds work their way into you and fill you up, so the burden you decided to drag along with you that day is rained-on, then water-logged, then sinks into the slowness of the current.

I. Our Daily Dance
 
The waning moon has this hour turned above the crowns of trees, and spilled its liquid light into the yard. So this evening is accompanied by a shadow of sun’s heat. The same moon that years and years ago was torn from earth’s belly, born from her and borne away on some celestial tide: once blazing with the fire that gave us life, now its patient ashes spy upon our daily dance, at times shy and out of sight, at times winking at our plight, or otherwise full-faced and offering its white-washed world for these our fine somnambulisms.
 With no one’s arms to hold you from these sights, the dimensions fall one into another, you join the ranks of every color-blinded creature as it flies or crawls or navigates the night, employing sharper, duller vision. A leaf-rattle makes the paw pause mid-step, a stick snap shakes the courage of the smallest, while above the sudden flush of air or nearly-silent slant of wing makes cowering the act of statues, whose hearts race from one moment alive to the next, still alive, alive yet still, praying to not be prey, hoping for no tooth nor talon’s spike to rake the nerves.
 
Some of us are larger: suffer less.
 
But suffer even so, adventure when better ventures aren’t reached by opening fingers, opened hearts. A footstep starts the body where the spirit would prefer to stop. Still. A stick snap stops the world around the boots of men: who goes there? What would a man be wanting of the night, if not a hunt of one sort or another?
 
The moon will not stand still; her mother moves below her, always at arms-distance, always departing. The child spins as if to turn away; the weight of their connection means she’s always falling toward her elder. A pure, white face: smiling as she rises her hello, sad as she departs. A desert of desire, whose fires went out so long ago, depends on stars’ impressions to light her further face.
 Who wouldn’t see a spark up there? Some ember that was better than its gray surround, some flickered flash of life that kindled past to second sunrise, companion star, golden guide to keep us honest and awake and in each other’s arms, to banish sleep in favor of a man or woman’s favored sleep companion.
 
 
II. Gift of Sight and of Delight
 
One can speak more plainly. An apple, for example: there was nothing woman ever gave a man that would be his unmaking. Genesis requires rethinking, since its metaphor is cactus-garden, is painful to embrace. If (for example) Eve opened Adam’s eyes, it was to preciousness of life. I suppose that might be blinding, but hardly expulsion from the Divine; invitation, rather.
 
There is some bland assumption by the readers of those ancient runes: a paradise was lost, to be regained at last when body’s been betrayed as temporary residence, reminiscent of a slum-lord’s tenement, reminiscent of a child who’s given no delight or - more likely - never found its gratitude.
 
I do not sign that lease.
 
Paradise is every moment, but skill in seeing clouded by emotions or events. The paradise of creation is in company of men and of women, building walls or raking them down, raising pillars of life or whirling in the great river of each other’s dancing, scratching at the earth or forging teams to push back need, or needing the sweet waters of ourselves to wash upon that labor, to loose the earth of us and make us one.
 
No, an apple, or a pomegranate, maybe have been a gift of fruit, of sustenance, of sight or of delight. The days that followed, simply striving to maintain that paradise. If missed, at times, or if (at times) we fail to be delighted, still there’s no mistaking it exists.
 

Yesterday I received a book as a gift.

It measured 8 1/2 by 6 1/2 inches, and contained 256 printed pages (including index), with another five in introduction and eight more in bookplate, title, copyright, dedication, contents, and trailer pages, in all about an inch and a half of paper between the hard covers. The covers themselves were a silvery-gray matte, embossed with a marble texture that allowed patches of sheen to show through washes of barely-felted cloth; the slipcover provided decoration: a smiling Brother Victor-Antoine d’Avila-Latourrette seated before the gate inside his garden, holding a hand-turned wooden bowl of ripe peaches, surrounded by his season’s harvest. Sweet peppers and mallows and basil and greens, dark beets and eggplant, mid-season red potatoes and green beans and the ripest red tomatoes.

Tangle - Mark Schultz

If you could sing the wind, your voice should wear a sighing sound, as if from distant sources you had flown, and half-way through your flight your wings were weary but not yet done. Or a whistling of time through the sieve: divided into strands that strain then stream in parallel until they tangle, intertwine, and fuse together once again. What else would it seem? Is it winter round the windows moaning ancient love’s lament, a loss remembered making sadness modern, soon to be spent? Is it wind that carries moonlight lightly on its back, depositing in drops of dew the dawn that trees and flowers rush to drink?

“No; no, please; no more.” Art stretches on the canvas, the sun fallen half-way round the sky, having sweated its way to zenith, now drying and diminishing toward the end of its day, the end.

“But why? I thought the work was just beginning? I thought: a little more color, how it changes from morning to noon (when the light is really too terribly flattening, don’t you agree?), and now again from noon to night, when it picks up a… poignancy… that almost causes fruit to ripen…”

Here I am, pondering the bits and pieces of technology that I am trying to band-aid together before our very real travel begins, trying to reach out of the past as I have known it – I am pre-moonwalk, after all – and into this strange and tenuous digital future, where words are sent out like puffs of breath in a pre-dawn sky, received by a few listening ears (maybe), then dissipate as quickly as they have arrived.