The Ninety-Nine

There are neither curses nor promises, only poiesis. I was a boy when they asked me to enter the forest alone. Trout strangling on the river bank, deer pausing on the ridge above the clearing. It matters, knowing how to make a fire. Crows everywhere, beautiful and terrible. "You fix this," said Dad because his mother had lost her youngest sister, who was a child, to a hurricane and said to Dad when he was a boy, "you fix this." You want peace, learn that only violence, not peace, can be personal. All this suffering, all this conflict. Where the river parts the distant hills, light appears. What did the ninety-nine think when the shepherd left to seek the one? All morning writing, translating body into mind, and mind into a prism, yours. Ten thousand years after the wedding we find the marriage bed and rest in it together. What is beautiful, what is terrible. What happens when you reach the prohibition on naming Her? Together we make a forest, together we are a trail. The found are a lantern unto those who believe in loss. It's not silence but stillness, and it's not stillness either, but still. Praise unto the one who showed me how to lay this body down. Chrisoula whispering here, Chrisoula whispering now.