Come and be my reader whoever you are, even floating dust motes in a shaft of sunlight a few feet above the concrete floor in an empty basement or anywhere truly vacant and waiting for hope or a single pane of glass reflecting every color and parr mark of a baby rainbow or maybe even the bright, rippling chords of a mountain stream tumbling down from the hem line of a cloud, but come and be my reader even if you don’t read these words at all, only hear them somehow deep inside your chest as they sound inside of me for we are married in a sound even as I keep bringing leaves into the house as Tina gently scolds me, scolds me accurately that twigs are not my possession, for they are too holy for my lowly name and stupid grasping, though a child part of me wants to grow a tree in the living room and turn my whole life over to bird song or the creative possibility of a nest fashioned out of rejection slips and old receipts to warm and nurture the chicks I will never have, but come and be my reader, for only in this intimate abiding and pouring forth may the confluence of our souls and every soul learn to hear and love each other’s voices for we are one voice after all and this can be proven by the hegemony of a single sigh over the whole human race and even the sky whose sighs are epic and the stuff of our high flying dreams as we soar above the earth, but please come and be my reader and come and be my heartache as on this late summer day a spontaneous wedding feast of crickets and cicadas and all who sound for us but also deep within as a spring fed stream a bunged elbow away from casting with either hand, be my fellow weaver of song and sentences that pirouette and play on the surface of some delicate field of forever and kingdom come so please come and be my reader, come and be my listener hunkered down in the dark and I will hunker down and even kneel and lean into you for spiritual kinship, which the world does not encourage and even shuns on cable news, and I will read the soft folds of your eyelids and the poem of your outstretched hands as heart-making texts of the finest mortal skin and cloth, I will harken back with you to your earliest childhood memory of summer afternoons so open wide and free you ran to every bud and blossom and learned how to walk quietly in the woods, heel to toe, heel to toe as we made moccasins out of ferns and something holy fluttered down to heal us, some kind of numinous and lyrical grace that is still somehow miraculously just above us ready to graze and bless our foreheads, come and be my quatrain, come and be my last note of a violin concerto in E major or minor, my fleur-de-lis come and not be mine at all but something that we share and celebrate together and then give away, a camp fire, a moment of pause in the great crush of churning time, the electric stillness of a butterfly landing on a lilac bush, her wings waving back and forth so slowly we know the graceful movement is akin to prayer, to thanksgiving, to spontaneous praise and love radiating out from the center of all living things, and soul-yearning I cling to you and soul-yearning I make my clumsy way on my knees and sometimes lower than a worm, I crawl with this sound coming out of my mouth and sometimes it is a scream, sometimes it is a whimper, sometimes it is a tender word and sometimes these words are fierce “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places,” and I am a shuttle cock struck back and forth from good and evil, the truth and lies, and maybe, just maybe my joy, this is what it means to be human circa the first falling leaf of autumn as we walk together to the end of this sentence to another place where every word is one, and every word is love.
Note: The quoted material is from the King James bible, Ephesians 6:12.