Just Another Strategy

Butterflies dreaming they are little boys dreaming they are butterflies. What winds carry us? What love undoes us?

At a late juncture I return to the swells of need, rising and falling in concert with the body's mute expressing. Winter stars reflected in frozen gravel almost half a century earlier continuously reappear. A story we tell that we realize too late is telling us.

Yet at four a.m. (and earlier when necessary), the monk-who-is-not-a-monk rises and makes coffee and sits quietly in darkness. Thomas Merton eschewed emphasis on form (sit this way, sit that) but that was just the culture talking. High atop the tallest apple tree, a single apple remains soldered to an otherwise bare limb.

She is Luna when we settle outside the familiar subject/object frame. A hill in Ireland that each time I climbed it grew taller, until at last I fled to a city without any hills at all. Who holds us by the fire, who follows us into the night.

Reminiscing about when we were convinced oneness was the answer, which it was not. In early January, a two-day thaw returns to our bodies a memory of green, which is not useful at all. Long drives, at least one of which I will not see the end of.

Investment is just another strategy. Rice with a little salt and butter, a few thin slices of fried steak, a mug of beer growing warm beside the fire. A promise is a tellerless story, gestating in a sacred womb.

If anybody asks, I'm out walking and can't say when I'll be back. A quiet near the river to which we will one day surely return.