Will you marry, Charlotte?

March 18, 2007

A moment arrives and a moment passes, water through your fingers. Beautiful water: touch a drop to your lips, your thirst is lessened; touch a drop to your eyes, they are cleared; touch a drop to your forehead, you are baptized; touch a drop to the soil, the flower grows.

From the electric arc of that instant, a trail of Past streams out, like smoke from a sparkler spun through the air, or heat from a flame that burns and consumes itself as it gives light… like words on a page, a trail of markings left behind the hand, a narrative guide, a history, each word a nod to a line that began and continues to be written.

A moment arrives and a moment passes, and the stories told of light and gentleness and innocence and growth are both a personal and shared history. The act of writing leaves them ashes sprinkled on the page, memories of the flame…

Once a house was lifted from pieces of the mountain, high on its shoulder, voices were thin as air. There were flowers: drops of paint. We hunted them in the valley as though we hunted game, so great our thirst for color, and carried them like gifts for lovers up the hill. I gave the widow at Chamonix a goat with a bell the sound of a church morning, when it rang we would tease the girls, Will you marry, Charlotte? Will you marry me? That was music. How high does a life grow. Always we worked against winter, from spring’s first green blade, each seed pressed into the earth was counted, was one more frozen day gone. We felt the breeze down from ice which never melted, we tasted it, something between us and the moon, we slept with it.

Time is filling with stories. The faces of loves and adversaries fill the air like ghosts; I could reach out and pluck one from the sky, and there he would be, there she would be, speaking and watching and remembering me a younger man. If I asked the spirit to tell Me as I was, it would be bound to answer. History is a current of wind that has ringed the planet and returned to its master. When you open your mouth to the wandering wind, it sings upon your tongue: all you need do is listen. Only if you judge it Right will it be dishonest; and only if you judge it Wrong will it refuse to speak.

Once there was a field as large as the world; from my door I saw to its end and saw no further. At night the crickets flew from beyond the horizon and sand all night to the moon when there was moon, to the stars when there was none, and I slept to the stories they told me. They spoke, and my eyes grew heavy, as though they were telling my sleep. In the morning they were gone, silent though I searched for them, not one of their number left behind.
In that field there grew a cherry tree larger than I can remember. It was rooted in the exact center of the field, and reached its arms up toward the blue skies of the Upper Peninsula as though lifting something out of the world. If I could only climb to the highest limb…
But so young a boy, I never would win my way even to the lowest branches, while my brother sat in its green embrace and ate cherries until the juice dripped from his chin. “Go up, go higher!” But he could climb only so far. The weight of a human body decides the length of our reach toward heaven; and when we are lighter, the length of our reach decides how far we can lift our weight.
A field, and a cherry tree, in the brief summers of my first years.