10.06.00 - 19:01:43

                Vision and Prayer [I]
                       Who
                     Are  you
                   Who is born
                 In the next room
               So  loud  to  my own
             That I can hear the womb
           Opening  and  the  dark  run
         Over the ghost and the dropped son
       Behind the wall thin as a wren's bone?
         In the birth  bloody room unknown
          To the  burn and  turn of time
             And the heart print of man
                Bows   no   baptism
                  But dark  alone
                   Blessing on
                     The wild
                      Child.

We are not sensible creatures, and one death is every death, and every breath is a betrayal of the womb's promise, because every breath brings us closer to our demise.

I do not want to die. I do not want to see anyone die. I want to believe that something will infect my dying soul, someday, some distant day, with unearthly light and the stars will shift beneath my growingly luminous skin and my breath will catch and falter, catch and falter, and my eyes will shine with the resumption/renunciation/redaction of -

- this, whatever it is, transubstantiation.

Is that moment, sluiced with regret and wondrous -utter- searing adoration, more holy than your thoughts about it?

Now. Now. Now. Your yearning, your heartbreak, your healing breath is better, richer, more nuanced than a thousand glittering certainties.

It isn't fair.

It isn't.

It isn't.

It isn't.

It's unlovely. It defies the first urge and breaks the promise of spring. Something always does.

The early hint of frost upon tender shoots, the flooding fury of a pounding storm, the sudden surge to heat -

- and it isn't fair that sometimes hands meant, or wishing merely to ease the hurt, to urge betraying flesh to rightness again, are helpless.

But where, then, the mystery of pulse, the altar of light falling across the roiling ocean, the autumn litter of birds across the darkening sky, seeking, seeking.

Sometimes it isn't fair. Sometimes it is better for the hands to hold the heart. Sometimes it is the only thing that keeps us sane.

...and, sometimes, it is most possible that I am being an absolute fool. Therefore, accept both my apology (I'm sorry. I'm sorry.) and my embrace of my foolishness. (I'm sorry. I'm...)

So read Dylan Thomas:

A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London

Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness

And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn

The majesty and burning of the child's death.
I shall not murder
The mankind of her going with a grave truth
Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath
With any further
Elegy of innocence and youth.

Deep with the first dead lies London's daughter,
Robed in the long friends,
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames.
After the first death, there is no other.