The Promise of No More Mirages

You visit in winter darkness, remind me it's okay to bundle in quilts, take tea instead of coffee, stuff like that. If I lean a little to the left, where the curtain doesn't quite reach the window frame, one or two stars can be seen. Did I mention it is winter? Or how I look especially forward to mica glittering in early Spring runoff? The cold this year is a metaphor for how lonely and sad I am but I am neither lonely nor sad. Also, when I ask for things, you don't say yes or no, but nor do you leave. This is a prayer. "This is a prayer" is a prayer.

This is a sentence in a prayer which knows the one who reads it does so slowly, lips moving to bring it forth audibly, aware of the one who for a thousand times a thousand years believed he was its author. When you visit, something somewhere opens, welcomes me, and becomes us. When I say "light" I mean that which makes everything - including thought, including "light" - perceptible. Holes in my boots let snow in and my gloves are too small so I don't really bother. When I walk, it's a kind of wobble, as if something in me is no longer sure where it is going. Has already arrived and doesn't want to leave? Well, travelers gotta travel.

When I was little, open fires outside were a comfort, and when I grew older they became forms of seduction - vast wild bedrooms in which our bodies smoked and glowed - which means eventually you have to let them go. These days, the monks in my quirky order build their own cells out of the psyche's mostly-unreliable alignment with narrative. Denial and projection become rivers one sips from, then wades through and swims in, then foregoes altogether in favor of a desert and the promise of no more mirages. When I fell in love with you, I wanted something, and when I no longer wanted it, it was too late to explain or escape. We are many marriages, we are many weddings, no one of which suffices unto our deep interior longing to celebrate and be celebrated.

Fellate and be fellated? Well, something worth returning for! I learned a lot of lessons in Worthington that were mainly about surviving Worthington, and only late in life did I learn that Worthington itself was an illusion. "It's turtles/elephants/family all the way down" is silly but going down is not silly for where else do we learn the value and meaning of service and attention? Unfold me like toy origami and what remains are creases indicative of the original form. I'm not saying "lost" and I'm not saying "visit." I'm saying that angels can be terrible guests, eating all the pie, smashing thumbprint goblets, and never once remembering to relay the message their creator sent them to relay.

Or maybe it's a letter, who knows. Between the vanishing beginning and my dreams of a sacred finish, something small and ordinary goes about its business. Those who have ears, et cetera.