Beings Overflowing

April 13, 2015
by Michael
comments 21
Poetry

There is a being
inside of me,
perpetually
spilling over
the banks–
One
whose color
I cannot name,
whose voice
patterns the sky
with tender pulsations.

I, myself, cannot
direct the geese,
but the One
inside of me
points the way.
Whisking through
a cold half-light,
each feathered movement
unerring in its answer
to the previous,
they glide
from one world
into the next
and back again
in one full beat
of their wings.

When I listen like this,
I realize there is a being
inside of the being
inside of me,
another One floating
to the surface,
and One inside
of that One.
I am a fountain
of beings,
all overflowing,
all watching together,
none of us quite sure how it’s happening:
two geese,
with their wingtips,
are painting the sky
with moonlight.

Grinding Down

April 11, 2015
by Michael
comments 48
Christ / Course Ideas

I haven’t picked up A Course of Love for a while, but picked it up again the other day and flipped to a “random” section.  I ended up opening to a page that was late in the Treatise on the Personal Self, which is a section of the Course describing the way in which the personal self becomes a living representation of the True Self—the latter being the identity we all share in unity.  Through the dialogue and exchanges I’ve enjoyed here with you, as well as with those in other areas of my life, this notion that we share an identity but differ in our representations of it has slowly taken root as genuine experience.  It is truly delightful, a warm resonance that resounds across the planes of our differentiation.

But I’m also still a locomotive tumbling across the sky on a daily basis.  So what gives?

Since comparison of my life and experiences against an ideal version thereof, or against the experiences of others, has diminished nearly entirely in its ability to provide navigational assistance, all I really know is that my life is my life.  I can only feel it.  I can’t really describe what it means.  I simply feel its tugs and pulls, its mandates and pressures, its joys and profundities.  While I know there are assignments of meaning and value I have made that somehow give rise to the constellation of forces that collectively induce the tidal rhythms of my experience, generally speaking the specifics of how my stance as a being resolves into the geometry of my path remain unknown to me.

In moments of comfort with this confusion– this mystery– this sensation of flapping in a gale force breeze feels as though it is a vantage point closer to the heart of what’s happening than any other I’ve held.  Not perhaps, as an accurate representation of the heart of what is, rather as a threshold experience of emerging from the grip of the illusory.  I am most comfortable right now when I’m not trying to make sense of what it is.  Simultaneously, the demand for wood-chopping and water-carrying are at an all-time high.  The village needs six cords a day cut and stacked, hot baths in the morning, and water for cooking.  Who can deny the validity of these needs?  In the professional arena of my life, I’m in the midst of a challenge of a larger scale than I’ve shouldered before, and it asks a lot.  There are many moving parts, none of which are in any one person’s control, and penalties for failure to deliver.  There are people who could be disappointed, people who could be marginalized, and people who may need to be confronted.

I see the situation as simply being the outcome of human thought patterns.  It’s the great set-up, this bit of circumstance.  It’s our deepest opinion of what is, enacted in microcosm.  The thoughts we’ve carried collectively and traded back and forth for so long regarding scarcity and consequence, authority and power, and fitness and survival resolve into these taut webs of inter-relationship.  What better place to practice surrender?  This surrender, though, isn’t a self-serving absolution of responsibility.  It isn’t a walking away from the village.  I think it’s more a holy restatement of what is happening.  The trick, I’m seeing, is that this isn’t a moment to say, “Ah, well, none of this matters, anyway.  It’s all a dream.  I will go over there and create a more peaceful one.”  It’s the opportunity to stand at the center of the maelstrom, and allow all of its elements to be renamed, with Love guiding my view.

A couple of passages in A Course of Love jumped out at me.

“Miracles are not the end, but merely the means, of living by the truth.  Miracles are not meant to be called upon to create specific outcomes in specific circumstances.  They are meant to be lived by as the truth is meant to be lived by.  Not because you desire an outcome, but because it is who you are and because you realize you can no longer be, live or think as other than who you are in truth.  This is how thorough your learning must be.  It is a learning that must not change to fit the circumstances of illusion but be unchanging to fit the circumstances of the truth. [emphasis added]”

“You must no longer see illusion for it is no longer there!  This is how you must live with it.  You must live with it as you once lived with the truth.  You must find it unobservable! [emphasis added]”

I see in the passages above the request that we live with the courage to deny the perception of threat or loss, regardless of circumstance.  That we embody this so fully we do not even see them arising!  In part, I think this requires that we do not place boundaries on our giving or our receiving– that we let the imminent needs of our lives touch us, not as signs of portents of difficulty, but as the poor and the hungry within our own hearts who need to be fed.

I think what our lives ask of us is complete commitment to what is.  It can be a deeply discomforting request, because we want to hold certain parts of our lives in reserve.  We want to keep them safe for ourselves.  Our special times.  Our special places.  Our special practices.  But if we divide our lives into the domain of the unholy and the holy, we will forever be broken under the strain.  Out there in the maelstrom are the needs we haven’t met, the parts of ourselves we haven’t welcomed back and embraced.  Maybe flapping in the winds, I remain available to them.

I have undoubtedly tried to be too much for too many at times, and likewise very often have been too little in others.  I have argued with circumstance.  I have been ground down against the possibility of failure, confrontation and rejection.  There is more grinding to be done.  But I am beginning to sense that what remains will be gleaming and restful, even in its continuing movement.  I think I am in the moment of my eventual undoing, and it is good.

The Cheering Section

April 8, 2015
by Michael
comments 30
Poetry

Three frogs
were sitting together
under a newspaper
watching the typhoon
of unnecessary human ordeals
roll across the sky
from one side to the other
like an entire model year of locomotives
wrestling for the glory.

It was Fantastic.
Thunderous.
Unpredictable.
Insane.

And I was in that sky–
whirling, pounding, placating,
admonishing, wounding,
encouraging, listening,
stinging, consoling, worrying,
wishing, dashing, leaping.
Suffering, basically,
all the madness
of that turbulent fury.

What I eventually noticed,
in a glimpse through a piston-laden
cloud of steam and blown whistles,
was that despite their genetically righteous
pre-existing conditions,
these particular frogs
were outfitted
with kazoo-mounted party blowers
that leapt into the air
like coiled tongues
when exercised, and that
infrequently they blew upon them
with instinctual amphibian abandon,
as if cheering us on.

We, the deranged.
We, the sky bounders.

We, the certain.

The Conclusions of Our Chief Investigator

April 4, 2015
by Michael
comments 22
Poetry

What I saw
was a line of smoke
scribed upon the sky
in a confident hand,
like the swift first streak
of an artist’s signature.
This was not
some willy-nilly
scribble
of carbonized particulates.
No.
Graphical in nature,
the arc was infused with information.
It was
an ember-tipped flourish
that induced a state
of euphoric anticipation
in the mind of every beholder–
a clear-slated readiness
for whatever might come next.
Spontaneous genuflections
and the unconscious
recitation of mantras were
observed throughout the region.
Troubleshooters
of a less mystical bent
chose to term
the event a simple meteor–
and the induced
apoplectic condition,
a rapt confusion—
while reminding us all
that outer space
is very well permeated
by awkwardly
placed
rocks.

Regardless.

Where the tip
of the quill
had touched the canvas,
there had been
a gleaming orange
tracer.
And where the tracer
had touched the horizon,
a dazzling puff
of innuendo.
Then nothing.

Silence.

For those with ears to hear,
the world was changing.
The heralds were
lighting up the sky.

We sent in our Chief Investigator.
We sent in the Buddha.

He rode off for the horizon
on horseback with an entourage
of sages, priests and naysayers–
with standard bearers and singers,
journalists, harpists and poets,
and the odd geologist,
all  standing at the ready.

The whispers scurried
across the land in their wake
like a tide of serpents
writhing out from their hoof prints.

Was it the beginning of the end?
Was it a portent of the Holy One’s return?
Would the locusts be next?
Would the beans germinate in the fields?
For some, it was clear:
the unjust would stumble and fall.
The meek would inherit the earth.
Others were answering the
celestial bell with industry–
stockpiling ferments,
woolen clothing,
sharpened blades,
yak dung,
dried meats
and other such necessities
as the brief preservation
of a particular life
would require.

By the time I arrived,
the crowds had gathered
in thick and bustling quantities.
There was a man-size boulder
at their center,
and a great, smoking sclaff in the ground
where an unskilled god
had swung and missed
with a seven iron.

Sketches were being drawn.
Proclamations being penned.
A geologist was explaining a specimen
of the cosmic rock
to a party of the interested,
pointing out its glass-like properties.
The sky-watchers had assembled
a flock of telescopic flamingos
on a nearby hillside,
but left them to graze quietly
upon the clouds
while they expounded
with full-armed enthusiasm
upon the significance of all that had transpired.
And what would probably come next.
There were dancers and singers
dancing and singing.
There were food stands
setting up along the periphery,
and knit textiles in the offing.

What had become
of our Chief Investigator?

No one knew.
What did it matter, anyway?
To be honest, they said,
his findings so often
lacked the oomph
of his predecessors.

On the ride out
an elder had fallen
from his trusted stead
and bruised his ribs.
I found the Buddha
tending to him,
holding the tiny hand
of the elder’s grandson
while they walked
back and forth to the trees
to collect small sticks
and seed cones
to build a fire
to heat some water
to make some tea
to warm a heart.

What do you think?
I asked,
once the fire was going strong
and the sticks were popping
and the water boiling.

A cosmic event
has occurred in the sky, he replied.
And just like this cup of tea,
which he held
carefully to the lips
of the rib-bruised man,
it has changed
everything,
everywhere.

Forever.

The grandson watched
his grandfather take a sip,
standing silent and still
for just an instant,
his head slightly askew,
before lunging off
towards the trees
in a karate-chopping
stick-brandishing
shrieking
bullrush.

Research

March 31, 2015
by Michael
comments 34
Poetry

They said once,
in the papers,
they found sea shells
in the Rocky Mountains.

To minds so disposed,
these findings–
like all such mockeries
of the mundane–
sparked a series
of concomitant revelations.
I know this
because Hafiz
pinned me to the wall,
told me to hold quite still,
and then cordoned my life–
which suddenly felt
like a pop-up trailer
with ten thousand doors–
into endless sectors
of moonlit bedrock
and crushed eons.
We wear head lamps now,
and we work deep into the night,
using toothbrushes
to scrape away the dust.

We keep in our mind
that once there was an Ocean
resting
six or seven miles deep
in that very spot.

What we’re finding,
are little heart pieces,
captured notes of music,
crumpled notes to self,
the ashes of ancient fires,
and other remnants
of Love’s passage.

And we’re finding them
everywhere.

Keepers of the Promise

March 28, 2015
by Michael
comments 32
Christ / Poetry

Snow tip-toes
through the sunlight,
falling in a dappled caress,
a lingering sweetness,
as the world bends
around the corner.
The passing season
is saying its good-byes,
asking to be thought of kindly
for all that was and had to be.

The blown kiss
leaves the forest
empty again,
a landscape between tenants–
a hallowed silence
filled with the changing light.
Who will come next?
A caravan of deer
march through this question
in a timeless, steady line,
through opening spaces,
along still barren trails,
stopping in turns to listen,
to sniff,
to see,
to drink,
to feel,
in the softening ground
in the softening light
in the softening song of birds,
who, also, are remembering
the ones left behind,
that they have made it.

Are their hearts heavy,
these who remain,
their eyes fixed upon the sun?
Or do they understand
the way life was given to life,
the way meat and fur and bones
were spread through the forest
beneath howling winds
and driving snows,
to feed the others,
to carry them,
to sustain those
who would also be needed
to build this new earth?
Do they know
what their living line,
striding out of that darkness
to be christened
in the light of an ascending sun,
means?

I think perhaps they do–
that they’ve always known it
in their surging blood
dancing hooves
thickening fur
and curious eyes:
where they fell,
they would also rise.

In the absence of
an insistence upon others,
the scent of this clarity
fills every season.

Perhaps they know,
far clearer than we,
what it means
to be the keepers
of a promise.

Flinging Fistfuls of Perfection

March 26, 2015
by Michael
comments 25
Poetry

I had a moment,
very recently in fact,
to which you might
be able to relate,
when I was looking up
into the starry sky
and thinking:
why not…?
Because
it wouldn’t even be
a violation would it?
Statistically speaking, I mean.
There’s so many of you…
It’s like a goo goo cluster up there, right?
Couldn’t there be some kind of
unexpected gravitational perturbation?
Like a universal sloshing effect
where just one of you
casually scoots sideways?
Right when I was looking?
Some kind of cosmic sashay???
No one else ever has to know.
It could just be our little secret.
A little wink from you to me.
If you could just give me that,
then I could probably cut
back on a few of my other
ongoing (reasonable) requests.

The sparkly silence never budged.
Just continued to stare back at me
with that same wooden,
my body is a cosmic miracle and I know it look,
as if to say, “We’ll open the presents in the morning.”

Alright, I thought.
That’s how you’re gonna’ play it.
It’s tough love time, eh?

I turned around,
intending to kick a pebble
into the gutter with sizzling violence,
only to find myself
quite a little torqued
Hafiz had snuck up on me
during one of my intimate moments
with the universe.

I relaxed all the muscles of my face
into a look of
I don’t need nothin’
an’ I sure don’t need you
cuz’ I’m a cosmic stone wall Jackson
and I put that look right on him.

What.  (I said it inside for emphasis.)

He was chuckling
in a progressively wanton manner
I didn’t find especially amusing.

You know, he said,
slapping his thigh and
hooting like a drunken owl,
every time you do that—

Do what.

He was fighting for air now.

Every time you beg all the stars
in a particular sector of space
to show you a dance move, he said,
they shake your life back and forth
and bang you around with the most
beautiful circumstances they can imagine.

And you just spit on the ground
and walk away in disgust.

Uh huh.  Right.  So what’s so funny?

He thought for a moment.
I guess there’s something about
the unbridled passion of a baby
throwing fistfuls of green and yellow nourishment
all over the room that just gets me going, he said.

Plus, he said, at some point you are going to eat your meal.

Disarmament (Part 5) (of 5)

March 24, 2015
by Michael
comments 43
Christ / Creative / Fiction

This is the fifth and final chapter of this short foray into fiction.  Here is a link to the first for those who may wish to start at the beginning.  We’ll return to our normally scheduled programming shortly, which as you may well have surmised, means I have no idea what comes next.  Thank you so much for reading…

* * * * *

Thinking there was a distinction between what was Love and what was not Love was the greatest handicap I ever faced… thinking there was a distance between who I was and who I might become.  These enticing distinctions held me under their perpetual sway, threatening me with assorted castigations lest I provide the satisfaction they so desired.  The judgment.  The righteous choice.  The verdict.  They strung me out on their sweet promises, then blackmailed me into refereeing their silly games.

They forced me to call the balls and strikes of my own heart.

–  –  –  –  –  –  –  –  –  –

When I yanked out the wire and tore through the web, I was freed of this thinking.  I was no longer hoping to fulfill the promise of a better nature—no longer hoping to get my shot at setting things right.  I was no longer hoping to be one who would be remembered, nor one who wished to be happily forgotten.  I was no longer questioning my ability to find the wire, or capable of doubting my courage should the wire be found.

Screw the wire.

I was simply moving into the heat of the furnace with the full power of my being.  I would find her, no matter where she was.

I stepped through the doorframe into a meadow of dried grass– a land of knee-high husks.  The sky was clear, the light low and golden.  The air was crisp and cool.  It was the plainest it could be.  The simplest.  It was Occam’s razor at its sharpest.  I followed a short trail of her blood, moving like a summoned power until I found her lying on her side.  Blood was slowly bubbling from a gash along her ribs as I knelt down beside her in the grass.

She tried to raise her head in greeting, but she hadn’t the strength.  It only fell back down into the straw.  Her eyes were bulging and her breath coming in furtive lunges.  I placed a hand on her shoulder to calm her, and I saw Jesus’ eyes again, in mine– those dancing flames.  The entire glade was full of such light.  Feeling the whole of her struggle pass through me, the urgency of her every inhalation dispersed into the sky of my own being.  Little by little, she relaxed beneath my touch.  Her breath deepened.  Her pulse slowed.  I ran my hand along the bridge of her nose, and when I rounded her nose she licked my hand, as if finding nourishment there.

She was my heart.

She had come for me.

I had come for her.

Such knowing, when it finally comes, is plain.  It arises without contest.  The light of the glade was clear on many such points.  The wound at my side, for instance.  Gone.  As if it had never been.  The light spoke of such things simply.  The light carried the story of how she had stepped forward, and walked through my pain to carry me out.  The light spoke of rejoining, and as we breathed together her own wound naturally came clean.  When mystery is all you know, there can be no mysteries.

You think a pain is your own, your burden to carry, your puzzle to work out.  You think you must master it.  Be the one to set things right.  The light was clear on this point: you must only be willing.  Willing to let it come.  Everything.  That you might discover what never was, and what has always been.

The juncos began to arrive as she scrambled to her feet.  They came one by one and perched on stalks of grass throughout the field, some near and some farther away, waving easily beneath the sky.  Jesus and Hafiz were crossing the field to meet us.  They were chatting.  Hafiz wrapped a blanket around me.  He welcomed me back with a long embrace, saying little.   What could be said?  The waters we each navigate are unique, the miasmas bizarre and isolating, but the journeys identical.  Notes of such things cannot be meaningfully compared.  We are each a secret meant to be shared the way bread is broken and passed around the table.

Something had passed from me, had vanished forever, but I couldn’t quite say what it was.  No one could.  The light was suggesting it really didn’t matter.

We put a blanket over her shoulders, too.  She was leaning into me as we stood there, keeping close, pressing her weight into mine.  We were relaxed.  Emptied out.

Clean.

Hafiz passed me a cup of hot tea and milk.

As we walked towards the road, I knew we would find shelter a little ways away.  That’s what the light was mentioning.  There’d be a family, and a meal.  Children chasing each other around the table.  Smiles and shrieks.  Pony tails and elbows flying.  There’d be little things that mattered more than I could ever explain, like the place settings.  The rug by the door.  The placement of the windows.

Jesus and I would slip out the door late in the night, and behold the stars.  How could one story matter?  How could it matter at all?

Yet how could it not?  For everything had arisen, just so.  Each star in its place.

By the time we hit the road and turned to face its length, she was gone—back where she had always been.

She was home.  Inside of me.  Where I could never lose her again.

Disarmament (Part 4)

March 21, 2015
by Michael
comments 25
Christ / Creative / Fiction

This is Part 4 of 5.  One more to go…  Part 1 is here, if you wish to start at the beginning.

* * * * *

He must have gone for help, the little junco, because when I awoke there were two of them.  One on my side of the window, inspecting the sill– making those erratic steps that come in packs of four or five– and the other one outside, moving only its head, looking around for the entrance.

It made sense.

I was too delirious to understand that it didn’t.  Too delirious to comprehend the magnificence of the white-chested bird.  The one inside.  So much mystery hides under cover of the explainable, we just miss it.  We’re drunken with explanations.  There was obviously a hole in the bedroom large enough to accommodate a big-horned sheep.  Case closed.

I looked across the room.  Still one step behind myself.

She was gone.  My messenger.  The hallway was just a silent opening, a shadow falling across the room.  Nothing more.  A solitary sob chortled through me.  The afterthought of a choking engine.  Where had she gone?  Had she ever been there?

Was I even wounded?

The answer shattered the question.  The pain ambushed me like a line of pointed-teeth thoroughbreds released from the gatehouse.  The starting bell was throbbing in my ear.  Ringing within its ringing.  My mind could block it out for a short time, while I was elsewhere, but the opened box of memories always pulled me back.  The horn sinking into my flesh.  The dull feeling of the couch at my back.

I turned back to the window.  The outer junco was gone, too.

I wanted to consider carefully my condition.  To reflect upon things.  To organize my resources.  Maybe if I rested, and gathered my reserves, I could navigate by the stars when night returned.  Maybe I could tease a junco into delivering a message for me.  It seemed possible.  Never mind I didn’t know what to say, or where to send it.

Or did I?

I decided if the junco landed on my shoulder, I would sing the shape of the tree I used to climb in the backyard.  Probably he would know the one.  I could hum the tones of the knob near the bottom of the trunk, of the lowest branch that was always too thick for my hand to clasp, of the spot nearly halfway up where three limbs sprouted in quick succession.

Come here little friend.

The pain intruded again as it made the far turn, a seething crowd of teeth and hooves and dust.  I watched expectantly as they came down past the grandstands.  It was going to be close.  A photo finish.  They swept across the line.

Where I had placed it anyway.

I watched in disbelief as they swept across without even slowing.  They dug in, and pushed the pace instead.  The bell was still ringing.  Their eyes were wide, their pupils dilated.  Their lips slack.  Their hearts afraid and hungry.  It was a race to the end.  I felt myself being diluted thinner and thinner.  I wanted in that moment, more than anything, to set them free.

I began to hum the notes of that tree.  Mercifully, I drifted towards sleep once more.  The last memory that came was of his eyes.  The dancing flames.

–  –  –  –  –

Next time I came to the surface I was reaching instinctively for a prickly sensation at my side.  I searched tentatively with one hand until I felt something sticky and stranded, like cotton candy.  There was a fibrous cord protruding from my wound.  Soft moonlight from high in the sky was spilling onto the window and dropping straight down onto the floor.  Poised on the edge of the light were the shadowed silhouettes of three juncos.

They were inside.  I could hear them cheeping to one another.  Raising valid questions.

The silk wire ran from my wound, down my leg, onto the floor, and then across the room to an electrical outlet, where it ended in a weblike cocoon.  Prickly shapes were commuting up and down the outside of the wire like ants making trips downtown for supplies.  I thought maybe this was it.  The way healing came.  I wanted to be grateful, to let them put me back together just right, but the spiders unnerved me.  Their eyes were bright green dots that leapt from the darkness and stung my eyes.  Red ones.  Yellow ones, too.  Like lasers.

But my pain had subsided.  I was being sustained in some way, and my bleeding had stopped.  My side was plugged by what seemed an infestation of cotton balls, and inside of that mess was the wire.  Its electricity was cool and sugary.  It even tickled a little.

As if responding to my attention, images began arriving, one after another.  Flowing down the wire.

They were the answers we needed.  The right ones.  How to solve the political game.  The key to ending poverty.  In one, I was up at the podium, pointing to the slides.  I was explaining the proper way to plant peas.  To breed sheep.  Most people know that chlorine in the water is bad, but they didn’t know the real reason why.  I could see why.  I was explaining this, too.  I understood the punchlines to every philosophy.  How to mix and match them like metal alloys– into lightweight, flexible structures– so that things worked.  So we could get along.  So that it could all make sense.  And finally, people were listening.

These were good things.  Needed things.  These were the gifts I had earned.  They were mine to offer.

I was at the beginning of an insight about solving the energy crisis when I saw his eyes again.  Gentle and clear.  Why was he interrupting me now?  Couldn’t he see what was happening?  I wanted to whisk them away.  I glanced up towards the window.  The juncos were trapped between the glass and the web.  Nearly ensheathed.  Their cheeping had changed into staccato clucks.  My breath froze and broke into a thousand glassy fragments.  Something inside of me– my best intentions– collapsed.

How could this have happened?

Across the room, the spiders were already working on the hallway.  They were about a third of the way up the wall, covering it over with a silken sail.

What was going on?

That’s when I heard the soft, tremulous braying.  From the bedroom.  Her call wobbled, like a shaky leg, and then gave out on itself entirely.  As if the very effort to sound her voice had sapped her reserves.  My heart flared with an urgency I had never felt before.  I crawled to my feet gingerly, nearly falling back to the floor with dizziness.  I took a step towards the spiders in the hallway, and searing pain exploded in my side.  The sensation of something tearing.

The wire wasn’t long enough to reach her.

I spun around and reached for the snips.  My actions were coming swiftly now, unquestioned.  The couch was covered in webbing.  I grabbed hold of the cord and yanked it once, as hard as I could.  The fibrous mass pulled free, but it was like being stabbed all over again.  I nearly passed out.  With one hand held to my side, pressed against the blood, I kicked through the webbing and staggered down the hall.

Disarmament (Part 3)

March 17, 2015
by Michael
comments 22
Christ / Fiction

This is part 3 of a short fictional series.  So far the posts are all in order…  So far…

* * * * *

They’d told me about the wire probably six months ago.  The jumper wire.  How it grew within us from the anode to the cathode like a clever root of ivy.  The fuse of a self.

A short circuit.

It was a strange trick: cutting eternity out of the equation.  Without access to the boundless panorama on either end of our existence, we’re just looping memories.  Ghosts zooming around the accelerator, hungry for collisions.  We’re rays of light, all bottled up– no distance in which to fly, no sun from which to spring.

And it hurts.  It hurts awfully– in ways that seem little and ways that seem big– but in the end you realize: pain is pain.  It simply hurts.

–   –  –  –  –

When I was halfway across the room I glanced to the window, looking for the sky.  I saw the rectangle of light on the wall, the fuzzy glow of its edges.  I felt the sincerity of my own movement, the grace of complete conviction.  I was the day after the storm.  A trespassing calmness.  A freedom without roots.

I heard a car door slam somewhere down below.  It felt close enough to touch, and the connection was immediate.

I hear you.

I am here, crossing this room.

This is my offering, my gift to you.

May you live.  May you hunger and thirst no more.

One car door seemed a secret greater than I could carry.  I took another step.

Though I was nearer now, just a step or two away, her breath was still undulating with the same easy rhythm.  Two pillars of steam emerging rhythmically from the shadows.  I felt a certainty of being that couldn’t be pinned on any one thought or feeling.  I was certain of all of them.  Of everything at once.  All I had ever carried inside of me was tumbling out onto the floor, spilling over my banks.

One more step.

She had soft, bulging eyes.  Black hooves.  Her front knees were slightly hyper-extended.  I reached out my hand and touched the bristled hair of her forehead, between her two short horns.  (It was smooth in one direction, prickly in the other.)  We joined in the darkness at that point of contact.  We completed a larger circuit.  She remained motionless, still waiting, her eyes unfocused, settled upon a point just above the floor.

I felt a gratitude difficult to explain.  She had come for me.  Across a great distance.  Was this merging?  I bent over and kissed her forehead lightly, and when I stood she sunk one of her horns deep into my side.  It was a simple movement.  Pure.  She lowered her head and took a gentle step forward, impaling me.  Then she stopped.  She was not afraid.  Not curious or apologetic.  Not attacking or pushing me away.  Just waiting again.  For the next instruction.

I gasped and shuddered.  My body knew instantly what this meant.  Memories of a thousand deaths were instantly freed, and their fuzzy wings whisked across my face, blotting out the view.  Fire shot through me, and I recoiled, staggering, not wanting to put any weight on the floor– wanting to just hover in the air.  To pause time.  To sit here for just a moment.  To thank the one who had slammed the car door.  To remember the squeak of snow beneath my shoes on the coldest day.  To tell her—the one who had come for me—everything I had yet to tell.

I found myself on the floor.  Motionless.  My breath was rattling in my throat.  I felt cautiously for the wound, needing to know, and winced when my hand came back sticky and warm.  The clock in my head had already begun to tick in the background.  (The fuse had been lit.)  How deep was the wound?  How much blood did I have?  I thought it was something like six or seven pints.

How long before they came for me?

The answer came, and I told it to myself as if making an announcement to all affected parties.  At least two more days, folks.  They’d said three nights, maybe four.  I swallowed hard.  I was too hollow now to be concerned with what came next.  Unable to track it, except for the logistics.  They were still there, faithful to the end.  Still taking stock.  How many hours until infection sets in?  The thirst alone will be catastrophic.  How long until I pass out?  Until the end?  What will it be like?

How will Jesus and Hafiz ever get this carpet clean?

I imagined Hafiz lighting up like a sale sign at the idea of cold water.  Yes!  Better yet, a steam cleaner.  A rental unit.  Jesus driving the van, lurching over the potholes, one elbow on the door frame.  Hafiz on the radio dial.

Let it come.

The voice came from inside of me, cutting through my numbness and delirium.  I could see his eyes, like dancing flames, looking straight into me.  Like he wasn’t buying it.  This strange dilemma.  My whimpering contortions.  He was carrying me.  Seeing through me and back out the other side.  From wherever he was, he was holding everything in place, like the stillness at the core of a galaxy’s whirling gravity.

Hafiz was nearby, chanting.

I felt a glimmer, then, an inkling of the idea that this wasn’t everything it seemed.  And then they left me once again.  I laid alone on the floor, my blood clotting to the carpet, to my shirt, to the wound.  Using my good side and one of my legs, I dragged myself across the floor and leaned my back against the couch.  I took a sip of water.

Up in the window, the sky was a powdery yellow.  A dark-eyed junco fluttered into view and settled onto the frame.  His little head swiveled once or twice.  He saw me.  Then he leapt for the sky.