The slow and the sad. There was an opening and Christ leaped fluidly into it. Against the sky in which the moon was a pale mollusk. The veil dropped, the horses stayed to finish.
Without grace, without calm. The tangle was lugubrious yet no less holy. What do you want the experience to resemble? The priest stepped slowly down from the altar, thinking of how certain sharks batter the protective cages of their photographers.
“I will go far from this family.” Christmas twenty-five years ago and the sound of the wind is still not buried. Mammon, of which there can be no regress. Or looking back, gun in hand, at a long series of choices that did indeed backfire.
Yet the foundation was there, it always was. The leather cowboy boots of childhood. “Well, thank you.” And the evening sky bore her body softly like feathers.
The geese made their decision, we could hear them over the many miles. They saw this river or that pond and redirected according to the glisten. The visit was brief yet effective. In the morning a tiny uttered prayer appeared ready to celebrate its echoes.