A Wild Night with Emily Dickinson

Cardinals decorate the maple tree: playing at mating, as if there were any other kind of play. The light this morning is soft, summerish, and the raspberry bushes - which are skeletal and exhausted - blush briefly soft red. Gold crocuses illuminate the matted grass. Many cups of tea go into making morning what it is and I am only at the beginning of understanding what it means to be tangential, forgettable, easy. Grief is a flavor of experience, joy is a flavor of experience, and the collective is just that which cannot otherwise be presently embodied, i.e., the space in the air where the cardinal is cannot also be the space in the air where the rain puddle is. It's okay if the lessons seem to go on a long time, it's okay to die confused. Looking up from the revised sentence - which is a new sentence - one sees the cardinals are gone, as if the maple tree were exhausted after a wild night with Emily Dickinson. Nobody knows what's next. Nobody knows the absence of next. Jesus finished his propositional gesture two thousand years ago: sunlight falls through an ever-opening sky. Don't say "now what?" Every "but" betrays the gift by pretending some gap exists between the one who gives and the one who receives. There are birds and flowers everywhere. The seed you are has wings.