This But Another Way

Between falling rain, bird song. Braids knotting gray clouds to the now-snowless earth. My love is this but another way.

The peace that surpasses understanding which, paradoxically, one encounters through a disciplined and sustained effort to understand. The God of spiders, the God of trout, the God of Heraclitus, and the God of all this and more. We leave notes around the house, reminders we are here.

It is like a light that exists around the skull, a sun appearing where you thought there was a brain, and now it is seeping out in beams and rays of purest gold. Love as a text, encompassing and complex, deliciously. I go for a long drive through the hilltowns in which I was raised, offering prayers for black bears who are waking up hungry.

The man who can't bring himself to cut down the side yard lilac even though it has not bloomed in two years. Grackles unevenly up and down the phone wire chattering. Whatever we believe, we can be argued out of believing: this is my church, all my fathers be damned.

We talk about the kids falling to sleep, holding hands under the blanket, a sexless happiness enfolding us. "He told good stories, he was a damn fine writer." I stand on the front porch with coffee on Sunday morning, a little after six a.m., listening to rain fall, wondering what I don't notice.

One peers through apple trees at the dawn, doesn't one. There are seams everywhere through which hints and intimations flow, allowing us to piece together the narrative that is our fundament. Good kissers in the back seat indeed!

Yet some of the rules do change, don't they. We who insist on sacraments, whose voices are never not in a song it seems we are made to compose.