Once I asked Hafiz what it was like to be God and Hafiz told me one night when he should have been sleeping he asked himself the very same question and when he imagined what it was like to be God he discovered God was imagining what it was like to be Hafiz. A psychic tremor occurred in the air of his breath like when you know your mother is calling right before the phone […]
Hafiz with a pick axe. A coil of rope laid over his shoulder. This is a rare sight. He’s standing in a flood of holographic daylight which doesn’t cast any shadows whatsoever because somehow in my living room the light of three majestic stars has intersected, and I swear we only ever had one star in the area capable of this when I was growing up. Behind him a few angels are stretching out in […]
We’re going to perform a thought experiment, Hafiz announces. What wonders to behold, I answer. (Why does he always assume that just because he wants to do experiments, I do as well?) (What irks me most is that I do, of course.) Hafiz bounces a rubber ball off of the wall and catches it with the same hand, without really even being aware that he’s done so, then holds it over his mouth like an […]
Remembering perfectly, so that you produce the type of knowing that actually yields light, does not take practice. But you do need to clear a space. Give it time, and allow it to happen. I left home once, you see— pulled the door softly-to behind me so the others wouldn’t be woken. Clapped my hands in the cold and breathed into their midst. The night was so thick you could smell the absence of light. […]
Hafiz and I were up on the widow’s walk beneath a flaming sky prancing to and fro, lunging, parrying, regaling the light with our imagined swordplay when his foot slipped unexpectedly on a pebble some bird had set there as a gift and my blade plunged into his belly and he gasped, staggered, and tumbled off the edge of the roof. I found him draped over the hedge with his leg cocked behind his back […]
What do you think the future will be like, Hafiz? I was thinking about fusion-powered hovercrafts and molecular sequencing technologies that could produce cheeseburgers from a teaspoon of good dirt. Redrawn political borders, bullet trains that crossed the ocean, and ways to download skills and information directly into your brain. I was thinking about teleportation and glass condominiums floating in the clouds. Something you drank that allowed your body to look whatever age you desired. […]
I went for a swim. Now I am dripping with this stuff. The words are all one-sided. If you look at the wrong side it’s not even there. You hold one up to the sun and it looks like a translucent ash, because we’re all falling out. In my desire to move in a quiet circle, I can see: sometimes even the straightest shot is a broken one. Life is this thing, you catch yourself […]
One day I looked Hafiz straight in the eye (his left if you must know) (my right) with the full faith and undeniable force of forty beleaguered years of human existence on this little planet of ours, which, in case you hadn’t noticed, is clearly going right down the same unsanitary tube as the one that we now call an asteroid belt, and I said half-jokingly, “Tell me the first thing that comes to mind.” […]
When I saw Linda’s Magnificence Challenge it gave me a moment of pause to think about how I might answer it, but it did not take long for me to recall a favorite quotation of mine I thought might get the ball rolling: “You are the work of God, and His work is wholly lovable and wholly loving. This is how a man must think of himself in his heart, because this is what he […]
When I awoke I found that Hafiz and I were riding breathless beneath a whirling sky of flames and television screens, beneath booming voices that emerged from the darkness to pound the night’s hide with declarations and logic that made the ground shake all around us like we were dashing through the replay of a furious world filmed on a handheld. Our lips were drawn in taut lines, our horses tireless, our clothing billowing and […]
Embracing Forever 