INTERIM: Lingering Too Has Its Limits

Bright Venus in the pale blue dusk, not like anything I know how to put in words. You say "I'll give anything to know you Lord" and the Lord appears and plucks your tongue out so you can't tell anybody which - it turns out - was what you actually wanted, bragging rights to divine visitation. Was it always going to be this way? I stand aside Main Street, dizzy from looking up, toes going slowly numb, my son's guitar faintly chorusing in the distant hay loft. February will end, winter will end, this body will end but there is something that will not end? "You can tell yourself anything," says the Man without Shoes. Yet later, under heavy quilts my great aunt Muriel made in the 1960s, the poems return after several days away, unintentionally traded for the dazzling insights of four a.m.. "You can't have everything," says the Man without Shoes, who never met a witch who didn't instantly invite him to inspect her ovens. One makes the case that it doesn't matter if God is real or unreal and is surprisingly lifted, proof if proof were needed that God is not attached to any particular ontological status. Coincidence abounds, as if somebody somewhere wants to be with us. All echoes are the effect of longing! Coyote cries in the forest remind me that lingering too has its limits. I've forgotten something: or I'm hiding something. Am helping someone? Look at me, four years old all over again.