Upon Arriving Home

Fionnghuala brings me daisies for the little vase my mother used to keep in the hallway so many years ago. One can be happy, unexpectedly, or is it like clouds clearing to remind you Sol never left? Even in rain, light. Books lay in piles across the floor of the old hayloft, oddly less comforting than one had expected, less like a text and more like that which begs for a text. Do all stragglers experience regret upon arriving home? And what does home think, if home thinks at all? How tired I am of special men - Jesus and the Buddha, say - of our penchant for following them, idolizing them, and how tired I am of history, the inevitable result of such specialness and inattention, its sprawling reckless skeins of narrative. Imitation is a form of violence! On the other hand, sturdy shelves, sturdier floorboards. Everybody is a child, everybody is in motion, everybody is responsible one way or the other. Briefly traffic overwhelms early a.m. bird song, briefly one is annoyed thereby. Masquerading briefly as in need of help? Well, in prayer anyway, and on a zafu no less. It passes and what remains is the same lilt - same melodious call - I have never not heard and still - and getting yet stiller - can't say what's being said, other than this. This this.