All day it has been set–the lovely flowers, the pristine linens, silver service, aroma of a meal wafting from bone china, but I do not know how to do this–how to sit to this table, how to make a banquet out of sorrow.
—Psalm 23, of course.
All these years the ghosts have always been there, in our carved out hills of refuse, in our streams of once-living
Water.
–Federal Judge Has Blocked Texas Fetal Burial Law – NPR–
I struggle with sadness (with good reason). The world is a dark place. Sometimes I will construct bits of words to hold off the sadness, things that are true but cannot fly or sing or curl up in one’s hands. We make words alive all the time–alive to life or alive to death, but not everyone can use words to make the dead rise or the sun, to speak worlds into being.
I know only One who can do that. Word of God, speak us all to life.
Despite my refusal to believe in the ghosts of the dead, stalking the yard, watching from the hill, beneath the trees where we have buried them, it remains the souls of the technically still living who haunt the before-and-after story of the man buried for another
never asking what exactly it is a carpenter does with
the disarray of
rails, posts, and sockets from the busted-in gates of hell
J, aged six and a bit, says that when he was young he thought that toddler was like butler–but small.
The cinder block wall is painted an ordinary tan and has been put there to fortress the waste bins. Tonight it creates a horizon line for the little cat with the clipped ear we call Kim Bop although God probably calls him something else as he draws lines for me along the wall, back to the retreat he beat away from the threat of the other cat, the bigger cat we want to tell him is no match for us.
We could take him, little guy. Just say the word
Trees remind me of home, as do the adorable wearable blankets one might buy for a baby born in a winter country. I struggle with the pronoun I, construct tree houses and wearable blankets out of words strung around the neck of a woman turning into the composite her grandmothers long gone on to the next thing…home…give me a cup full of it, your face, voice in my head, Man who shows up just in the nick of time in sorrow as piercing as joy.
Perhaps you know this place. Perhaps it is just up the hill, just around the corner, just out of reach on the spectrum of visible light
Dog-whistle-there
For-those-who-have ears to hear
She mistrusts me now, with good reason. I took her smallest one and when I brought her back it was only to say goodbye. She moves the surviving ones to the back corner of the closet where they are surrounded by the fragrance of girls’ Sunday dresses, sashes the vines and tangles of a forest we can only see through the window. She shuns the crass plastic takeaway boxes for the Formica bowls we bought in South Korea before you were born, before you were the little ones stashed in the closet for safety. I wish more things were just metaphorical thought experiments and fewer things were laced with grief and its outsider ways.
I understand when she lets me feed her and when she growls be careful, lady, I am done with white man’s justice.
“Don’t worry, Girl,” I tell her. “No white men here anymore.”
I am tired of this thought experiment, this place inside the box where brilliant but uneven men might shape narratives about alive-but-already dead cats. We are all either alive-but-already-dead or entirely eternal in the throes, in the arms, beneath the motherly, sheltering wings
Of the Divine
So good, so very good
…at
setting captives free
What if people (at least four dimensions, mandatorily eternal) could be reduced to letters? You might me a J or a d, I would be the more stolid E, B, or m. But there would be others, people we knew from yesterday or long ago. People like K or even another J or two.
We look for meaning in things like letters, and we are right to do so–meaning is everywhere, the meowing cat left behind to remind us of his master–Living God, whose own call is both fluid and foundational at the same time–living water and corner stones, foundations not washed away by floods.
M asked me how I knew J was gay. I told her an odd story about a single wistful look caught in a rearview mirror–oddest thing always knowing it was you, not me he would have loved.
It did not matter. He was both four dimensional and a parable of letters, sometimes numbers too as he sat in the sun by the pool trying to extract meaning from a single fortune cookie when the inimitable light of the sun through clouds was a painting lit for him by the frickin God of the Universe.
I grew exasperated–Why are you looking for direction from a fortune cookie when His love is right there for the asking? His attention so focused and ransoming?
See so many letters, when you know the real story is much more like a very good doctor doing whatever, whatever he can to save a dying kitten
For love.
Carrying Light 