A Song that Remains Familiar

How there is light at the tops of the trees first in the morning, when everything else is shadowed. How there is all this. 

How when my heart beats faster and my body grows dull there is still a clear path. How the dead come out of the mist shyly, holding dandelions and knitting needles.

How there is all this, and how all this falls into itself, like light into a mirror. The horizon and what is beyond it.

How there is a song that remains familiar even as everything around us changes and gives up on itself. How there is no such thing as an interruption.

How a thought is like lightning and like hours of rain, both. The river curving by the old dairy farm, the willows leaning over it, as if sheltering the ghosts of cows.

How the heart has no bottom, only a journey coming to a close. Crayon angels.

How in earlier times they taped feet to the floor to show us the right dance moves, and how I could not find my way even then, for her hands were so soft in mine, and the idea that one could live this way, in this proximity to beauty and the Lord, was more joy than could be accepted. How there is yes, and yes, and yes.

Smoking cigarettes in Dublin on Bloomsday, 1989, that register of tired that doesn't even sleep. Roses for sale, lilies for sale.

How not everything can be photographed. How the mind creates itself out of love for itself, and how it is possible to know this, and to become this endless creation.

The stream of the Milky Way is our home as well. How it is known: that which longs to be known.