In the Nature of a Guest

Morning winds evoke both landscape and season other than what both map and calendar declare are real. Or here? The longitude between us is a frayed flag, coordinates one cannot put a hand on, not unlike those rows of fine chocolate behind the Parisian chocalatier's window in 1989, when I was even poorer than I am now. Reflections cannot be hungry, cannot experience craving, and yet here I am translating a dream of swans into sentences for her. Labor in the garden is a sort of middle finger to the specific death that looms now, the way yesterday thunderheads loomed on the northern horizon and hard winds tore maple leaves from twisting limbs. What the Lord giveth, the Lord taketh, but two can playeth at that game. When we hurt, we hurt, and when we are joyful, we are joyful, so what's the metaphysical fuss? There are paths to the garden through the meadow  on either side of which wild flowers blossom, unbeckoned but here, recalling the wild morning glories we used to find in Worthington, what seems like lifetimes ago. How vivid this moment of being! Also, how fast can you run and where will you go when you get there? Insight arrives in the nature of a guest, meaning that late in life - on the cusp of fifty - I have finally learned one doesn't solve problems so much as allow them to be solved, which is not an argument for a deity with agency but a recognition that what is is always this and this is always this this. Now will you give me that gift we discussed? That moment when you see how the specific is merely a label for the general - a sort of mask - so that there is not a woman for whom you lust, there is lust, and there is not a garden one uses to resist the fear of loss, there is fear of loss, and so forth. Suddenly briefly I found the stillness Tara Singh spoke of, and wanted to tell him, but he assured me that notice was not necessary. Not quiet, not solitude, but a sort of untouched center that touches the world and everything in it. Well, the mountain does ask to be climbed, and my feet are not averse to that particular journey, are in fact quite good at it, the implication clearly being that in a past life I was your sherpa. Beware of explanations, especially explanations that resonate, where resonate means you really like it, you want to take it home and kiss it on the mouth. Up we go, in the many ways up implies. In the interim, one adopts the mien of a treasure hunter, a satisfied treasure hunter, a retired treasure hunter even. Come closer, okay? It's all about whispers now.