The Sabbath Unabashed

How little there is to say in the end . . .

The salt that so long defined the self - deltaic folds, bloody wounds, battlefield hardtack - at last washes away. One wakes to rain and what will neither be defined nor ignored.

He carries his mug outside - rain drops make tiny ripples in the coffee - and decides against working in the forest. Wordiness is my real love, though others influence the main, the always-emerging composition.

T. suggests I hunt with a bow, given my evolving inclination to use only tools that would be familiar - and instantly applicable - to men ten thousand years ago.

And the rain grows steady, thrumming on the windows where I write.

Last night - wandering around the fields half-drunk and laughing - my breath was visible in reedy moonlight and I thought of when you turned off old televisions the picture receded to a point of blue light I used to study, seeking the precise moment between "it is there" and "it is not there."

Like sleep?

I said to a student the other day "don't talk to me like that about Emily Dickinson if you haven't read all her poems and letters" and she said "okay then - I will read them."

Look, winter is mostly about knowing how to be warm in the old ways - first, other bodies, second, fire, third, a good blanket, and fourth hot food - soup and bread and - as February deepens into March - melted cheese (make your own with raw milk acquired from a farmer who speaks respectfully of cows).

One never utters a false word about cheese which, like bread, changes the one who makes it. If you can't eat there and if you can't slip the clothes off whomever you're calling beloved there then it's neither a church nor an altar. Keep the sabbath unabashed!

I have gone farther than anyone I know and the company grows thin indeed. How lovely the mountain when you stop trying to write about it.

And yet. All morning my enemies visit and I see through my perniciousness to what I love and hold so reverent in them and the blessing (which is simply kindness) precedes accordingly. For the first night in I can't say how long I chose to lay down beneath several blankets, on a sheet, even though my ratty old sleeping bag and the ten thousand stars begging to be looked at were calling me as they always do.

Neither theism nor atheism but something else older even than our sad, our unworkable dream of answers.