The Other Side of Sunday

Perhaps it is vitrails all the way down. Or am I lost and a piece of fruit is missing me. Did I say something wrong?

Mortifying personhood in order to see clearly the other. A sound rain makes when falling on tipped-over sap buckets. Slick hematite. As in a fairy tale, long ago.

Even no-sun is light. And there are no channels.

Forest a thousand miles away. Others ten thousand miles away. And the cosmos has eyes.

Flannel pajamas. Chaste kisses. Who is watching who?

"That something is God," she writes. Pretty violets. Miracles.

Nightmarish downpours after midnight a dozen rosaries long. At six a.m. exhausted one topples through sleepy recesses where dreamlessness doesn't quite take. Enya songs.

One comes at last to rest in the Star of the Ocean, the Queen of Flowers, the Mother of Christ. Tractor trailers on side roads going home. John Denver on the hifi, the other side of Sunday.

What is good.

What is suffering.

What is without limit, forever and ever? Why Om shanti, why amen.

Therese's sense that God has no need of our works but only of our love. Two-day-old bread fried with eggs and butter, topped with caramelized onions and warm maple syrup. There is no way forward now we are no longer trapped.

We learn to love looking away from the self. This sacred heart, this sanctioned hit.

Was it, after all, nothing? This exile, exhumation, this expression of turtles, this ongoing surfacing in love?