Not a Light

Of desire made, of woman born. We are like apertures really, slits through which light pours, through which the whole is glimpsed. The lovelily fragment that implies the whole? I tell you with all my heart it is a holy sufficiency to perceive not the whole nor its absence but simply what appears. Even our labels are divine when we do not cling to them but let them fly wherever like barn swallows, dandelion seeds, sentences, star dust. Study et cetera! See clearly its many seams, how neatly they bear our projections, how indifferent they are to whether and how we dissolve those projections. Precisely because one is attentive to it, the peony never dies, does not even rise and fall in time but merely is, and inattention is what makes it so. Dialogue is not an answer, not a light shining in darkness, and not a city on a hill but a cheerful and quiet means by which we share with one another our fixed incapacity for truth which, paradoxically, yields truth as an experience (rather than an object to be perceived, forgotten and re-perceived). Seven a.m. traffic, chainsaws, blue jays. How precise hunger is! I hear distant hills growing, I can feel the Beloved when I breathe.