A Woman whose Hunger was Dangerous

Given distance, the mountain recedes. Jesus goes on speaking and you drift a little listening, his voice calm and your soul happy, drifting as you have since childhood when certain outside winds were right. The closet, the basement and the attic. Snakes unfurl and reveal the law. Given wings, one floats into the sky, close but not too close to the sun. She was not a goddess but a woman whose hunger was dangerous, allowing me to recreate old energies and live in them a while. Chrisoula and I walk a long time circling the village, pausing to look at the horses from the other side of the river, talking about love. What goes on beneath the many changes that seem to be our lives? Something sweet occurs when you realize you're not too special to die. Wedding band blues. Pansies carved in gold. There are other possibilities, always - what else is grace? These lives felt like flowers once, and once they felt like stories. A bright jewel in the void, the last ray of sunlight on Solstice. A heaviness lifts, a bear passes, cardinals fill the sky. Look at us all standing quietly hand-in-hand on the shores of this pretty, this deep-but-not-too-deep, New England lake of fire.