The road to the abode of angels is a delight of crumbling edges and potholes.  Wild shrubs and grasses sway on the sidelines, each stalk hanging on to strings of pearly dewdrops.  It leads into a range of low mountains with sheltering caves, the kind where the prophet met the fearsome words of  archangel Gabriel, announcing his mission to the world.

The angels out that way are calling on you, my beloved. Fear not, even if the tomb’s dank dark shadow hangs heavy over your heart today.

It is the season for persimmons.  He cured one for me in a paper bag for a week, came to see me armed with a slicing knife.  He is thirsty, climbs the staircase in stages because the cancer in his thigh is growing itself a formidable pouch.  The sac ruptures twice, lands him in the hospital, where they pretend that it will get better once the pus is completely drained.  But of course in the meantime he needs rest and it is I now who comes to his room.  I hand him a glass of water.

"I want more life, that's what I want." He always asks me to draw the curtains, to see me better, he says, because of the glare at my back, and I feel guilty every time because he is missing the radiant spring outside.  But he is more interested in hearing, and I must fish out the batteries for his hearing aid amidst the rubble and bottles of medication.  One day they disappear for good.  I am reminded that in his dream the strap for his saxophone breaks and he cannot play anymore, so we might as well stop pretending that we understand each other and sit quietly together, listening to the stirrings of my pregnancy, which, when all is said and done, is drowning all the noise of the outside world anyway.  We are both sick and exhausted with the conceivings of a new life, panicked, in fact, in need of painkillers and tranquilizers just to keep the gaping yawn of infinity at bay.

At last his hallucination grows a black box on my head and he commands me to remove it.  I obey, careful not to let the lid fly open as I balance it between my fingers.  This would have been the ultimate disaster but we avoid it.  I never learn what is inside and I am glad: the season for persimmons is here, as it always is, and I must yet taste their sweetness.

Our feet were wont to stand in thy courts, O Jerusalem: Jerusalem, which is built as a city at unity with itself.

Absence is the mother of desire...

Beauty is a snare God sets out for the soul to draw her nearer in love

The deluge #3

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Is "here" a dimensionless point, or the space extending as far as my vision allows? Where does "here" end and "there" begin when the "here" could be indefinitely extended? In this moment, R comes to me, and my whole sense of existing shifts and extends far beyond the volume of my body. "Here" extends over continents and oceans, encompasses even the sense of "now" to include the moment when he looked up at me with his four-year-old's gaze. Even if his questioning eyes are conventionally understood to belong to the past, to my memory of what had been,and even if those eyes are, in the linear "now" forever closed in the black silence of his grave, the fact remains that space-time shrinks and expands indefinitely to make way for our relationship - for relationship: the current between I and Thou.

The deluge #2

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A newly-discovered joy: reading poetry to an infant. We are currently on the poet-hermit Ryokan:

Once again the children and I are fighting a battle using spring grasses.
Now advancing, now retreating, each time with more refinement.
Twilight - everyone has returned home;
The bright, round moon helps me endure the loneliness.

The deluge #1