Socrates Always Said It Would Happen

Rain falls - everything is muted - but I am not muted. Hours after midnight sitting beneath the apple tree while the horses come and go, breathing and stamping in the moisty dark. Even thought leaves me alone now, but Chrisoula visits, as vast and encompassing as where one goes when they are no longer bent on being holy or unholy. How many yellow leaves can my shoulders bear? What is it they whisper going down? How many disciples have to throw their sandals into the sea just to get my attention? Whose idea was Jesus? And what if this little upturned turtle shell - the one Chrisoula made me at Fitzgerald Pond with a kiss - won't reach the far shore? Yet when I turn to the house she is there waiting and in her tired gaze I am all at once lifted. Made whole? Well, the night does pass and I do refuse sleep and so the day does rise like a tide against my knees. Why did Sean make an art of forsaking love? Why did he insist on going shoeless through the snow, year after year after year? A lifetime of aimless paddling redeemed by a vigilant Greek woman, the way Socrates always said it would happen. At dawn I tell her I am scared I have confused visions of Christ with chickadees, and chickadees with visions of Christ. "But I am always laying you down on simmering pine needles," she whispers, easing me down just so. "I am always giving you my Name," she breathes, and wreathes me in her circumference, and carries me home through the door.