Through Kisses and Fasts and Prayers

Bird song on what is for me a busy and worldly kind of morning. One rolls through sleep as if on tides meant for another kind of body and wakes as if no time at all has passed.

The dog comes in breathing hard which means somewhere there's a rabbit hiding beneath a shed also breathing hard. Crab apples beginning their soft blush and one thinks as always of dowsing and of the secret life that so many fathers lead.

Prayer is continuous, in the sense of the sea, or outer space, and one moves through it aware or unaware, and knowing the distinction can be helpful. So many voices pleading to be heard!

One moves in the direction of silence, led by words that are hardly their own. Rain clouds overhead and a moist breeze and too many nights without catching a glimpse of the moon.

D. left his barn door open which means the horse was more troubled than usual and at least one chicken is decomposing in a fox belly. We are all hungry and attend our appetites accordingly.

I remember K. telling me in Burlington all those years ago, every time I hear you play I think you need someone who plays accordion but quietly. Ireland reconsidered.

Where one should work, one plays, and this is the result. The tea is not God, nor the old mug containing it, and yet you can become so happy thinking otherwise, it's almost as if the tea is God, and the mug too, and why not?

Comparing chubby medieval angels to pats of butter felt risky, oddly, and while toppling through vales of sleep after, the man without shoes felt unsettled in the sense of wanting to explain something but what. It is not angels precisely but rather the shades of blue through which they roll and how that somehow relates to soup during Lent, or maybe lilacs near Chicago, or am I trying somehow to say thank you without feeling weak?

And then P. telling me "there is something you should be doing but I can't quite figure out what it is," and I laughed at the neat - the fitting - articulation. Sometimes when I think I've wandered far from Jesus I say quietly - desperately really - "are you still there Jesus" and there is always a quiet affirmation, usually involving either flowers, birds, snow flakes, stars, the moon, or beams of sunlight interacting with water.

It is not about women anymore, which means a kind of desert one always avoided, which really really means accepting that God is not partial to landscape or gender, which really really really means that communion is something other than bodies fumbling through kisses and fasts and prayers. On the other hand, how sweetly she sleeps, and how sweet her dreams must be, and how she wakes a moment later as if knowing who is there and says "hey you," and it is true, it is me, and not me also, and I like that, I am ready, I do.