Driven by Angels

What if the Taung Child's death cries are the cosmos?

Nothing suits us like being naked by a fire.

Kissing in the shallows.

You cannot pursue grace, can only grow still and quiet and remember grace, for it does not move and has no intention to evade, but is simply the nature of the cosmos.

Crucifixion decoupled from resurrection: that emptiness.

A hand-carved wooden bear my grandfather gave me, also a little block of smooth dark marble.

Sweeping snow off the stairs, sitting to catch our breath, remembering that for all that went sideways in this life - which a lot did, and does - the path was never obscured.

Not disco but the lights and not even the lights but the mirror ball itself and not the mirror ball itself but beauty and not beauty but what cannot last because it does - it truly does - point to what is eternal and infinite, which consumes all signs, including the ones pointing to it, and therefore in which all this muttering and observation is at last home.

The mailbox the day after a drunk clipped it with his pickup.

I am the man who shot at deer but deliberately aimed high, was shamed by the other hunters for missing, and shamed before my father both for missing and wanting to miss (which he knew in his heart was my project), but worth it man, worth it.

Getting stoned once at rehearsal and rewriting "Whole Lotta Love" as "Whole Lotta Kale," all of us laughing so hard we couldn't play, a happiness I still recall.

Fires at which we are not warmed, only reminded of destruction.

For what are you asking, really?

Late morning snow flurries.

Pushing out of bed at three a.m. in order to read and write before work, a discipline for which I take no credit, being driven by angels who are indifferent to my wants.

We who were married by a river, literally.

Distance our chapel, bird song our wedding bells, pine trees our many guests.

Chrisoula nixes the yurt and I drive to Vermont, hurt and angry, stopping at that place in Chester for coffee, drinking it in the car shivering, lost in the way I agree to be lost, over and over and over.

Our enigmatic host!

Listen to the storyteller who says: wishes are part of the story too and never entirely in vain.