Checking the Sky Before Bed

Rereading von Foerster's "Through the Eyes of the Other" which three summers ago saved me from despair, only to later plunge me deeper into an existential crisis from which I was gently retrieved by a fluorescent telepathic octopus with surprisingly helpful insights into prayer, othering and inner peace. The cashier says good weather helps, I was going to say good cider helps, but the important thing is we are both thinking in terms of helpfulness. This new habit of checking the sky before bed, ensuring stars are out, then drawing sleeping breaths into antique lungs. In days and nights such as these indeed. This fatigue - a kind of sorrow, a kind of clinginess - upon seeing the confusion of others, knowing it must be allowed to dissipate on its own, without input from me, which it will, in time. Gazing into cloudy October skies, nodding at Venus which is there but unseeable. Near 3 a.m. a light rain begins and my heart - that useless bellows - flutters like a sparrow in the jaws of the Great Cat. I am blind because she makes me so and rather than visit the divine ophthalmologist, I go into the world, sightless and alone. Weddings upset the heavens, decoupling and recoupling us like starfish exhausted by death. Look at us taking turns going down on the Goddess of Again and Again. Again.