Some Divine Confirmation

The sound of wings, a book shelf on which dust moves as if just because. A narrow window with frosted glass, cherry-colored because one does not care to equate light with blood. Late at night the door creaks, and fireflies step through timbered webs of dewy grass on which the dogs hunker, breathing heavily, waiting for rain.

When rain is coming, the wind blows and the maple leaves turn frog-side, and so you have to go home. We fished on the old beaver dam off Scott Road, using for bait the bread that our mothers had used to make ham and mustard sandwiches. Ask why one memory endures over another and then listen.

Or what is the illusion for? S. says that we make our own dreams and populate them according to a hidden yearning for narrative that wouldn't be exposed even if we wanted. We laughed a lot, everything was funny, I remember that.

What longing? What really happened? Did one of us actually say at such an early age, God is blind and the falling rain is proof?

Though it never happened I remember with utter and crystalline clarity lounging on marble stairs out of the sun, the taste of morning olives and tea still in my throat, as a man passed on the street below, one that I was sure I had been executed a week or so earlier. No love without vindication, no vindication without love? Rather, all arguments fail, as all communities are to be gotten beyond, if any mystery is to at last be resolved.

So ask if you feel silly or ashamed at trying to recapture the joy you felt as a child watching dust motes swirl through pillared light in the library. A photograph or a memory or neither and if so then what? I wrote he wrote now.

And held a hand up as if to see it, as if in search of some divine confirmation. Or was it conformation I meant to say?