Prismatic Fragments

Snow flurries in sunlight, life dissembling in prismatic fragments. Across the river, Trudge's Belted Galloways bellow. What is death but a comma?

Sitting quietly in shadows, sipping coffee, breathing slower, the body increasingly a mahogany table on which a meal is set, a repast I no longer crave. Jade turtles. Kim brings peyote by, a ceramic bowl full, and sings a quiet song on the porch while I hold the bowl to the snowy sky: blessings.

Of all the things I was wrong about, to have been wrong about that still hurts me the most. Chrisoula turns to me in the half-light of dawn, pulls me back into the warm tent of our bodies where we talk gently about guilt and letting guilt go. A whale-shaped candle holder I cannot bring myself to accept, a sense that somebody else somewhere needs it.

The narrative including extended family, the practice of forgiveness unchanged despite the apparent shift in intensity. Salad with grated gruyere. Wondering at midnight wandering up and down the windblown black ice of Main Street, is there any description of happiness that does not involve the word quiet?

Those who mistake us, and how we live with them anyway. Discussing rhubarb pie recipes with Fionnghuala who says she has perfected a gluten-free crust and wants now to figure out perfect fillings. The past and the future are black boxes, sort of like strangers we keep bumping into on a train.

Spiders, too, are beloved of God, a point Maturana made several times, indicating a psychic side-road I know exists but so rarely find for myself. Certain stringed instruments are returned to the attic - the mandolin, the banjo, and Jeremiah's first electric guitar - to make more space in the hay loft. I offer to drive and do.

Perhaps this is the last morning ever, wouldn't that be nice? Letters flying out of their envelopes, mergansers floating on the river, my eyes still smarting - possibly partially blinded - from my long-standing insistence on such intimate proximity to the sun.