blossoming tatters

When hope rises, it illuminates the future, a space that just moments ago was the darkest of alleyways.

She comes each day to the foot of this alleyway, one street lamp above her, shining down on her blossoming tatters. She knows what she looks like, standing there. She sees it every day in the mirror. Every window she passes. In bathrooms at parties, fixing her hair, this is what she sees.

She is standing at the foot of this dark alleyway. It is the future, but she cannot see into it, and though she tries she cannot yet trust the darkness. She fears it is empty, and she hesitates to walk.

She stands rigid below the street lamp, pale in its narrow fluorescent light. What the lamp shines on, this is what she knows. She can be sure of that. The blossoming tatters. The hope of hope.

She can be sure also of her grip. She has a good grip. She can hold on. She can weather a storm. She can walk in bright light. She can walk in darkness too. Everywhere but down this alleyway, where she stands and stares as if at any moment something may emerge from those deep shadows. Her anticipation stares too from under the lamp, watching for what might come out to meet her, instead of her going in to find it.

No, nothing will come. She must go.

(Parts of her have already gone, she knows. But the alleyway needs all of her. It needs what is standing under the street lamp.)

While she drives to work, she is standing at the foot of the alleyway. While she showers, she is standing at the foot of the alleyway. When her eyes flicker, they are focusing on the alleyway. When she turns her lips away, they are turning towards the alleyway.

And then sometimes, out of her depths, hope will rise. And when it does, the alleyway is illuminated. And then she can see that there is life ahead of her. Then she can see there is a lot of life.

And then more alleyways. And then more life.

And in these illuminated moments, which sometimes last for days, and will soon become weeks and months, she seems to forget about the bright, sharp street lamp above her. In these moments it is not only her and her fears that are illuminated in this darkness. It is all things and all people. It is everyone's hopes achieved and hopes dashed. It is all the dreaming and all the grasping.

It is a million-million dark alleyways, flickering madly as hope rises and sets in human hearts all over the world, like so many fireflies in the fearful night.

It is the human condition, of which she is a part.

And in its light, her tatters blossom a little more.

Angelus

By Cynthia Zarin

One opens the book at random, opens the day,
reads the old architecture whose face runs
like a dog along the window while the sun plays
catch with itself, bounding from Sunday

to Sunday, speechless with desire.
What more could there be than this?
The beams of the cottage, the sheltering
bones of your hips, the great abbey

of the afternon that fills as we watch with sound
and the voices trail back to you from the apse,
from the nave, from the shell-shaped hollow
at the base of your throat that even as it says

what it wants, even as it wills it, holds back,
and a great threshing noise saws the air
as the new beams are hewn all over again as
they must be continually, and knowing this

our very words, making and undoing, are torn,
the color of blood. For why are you here before me
after all this time, time which was mine alone
but now, because we have brought each other

here, belongs to you? We talk to each other
as birds do under the eaves, like the swallows
who return and return, and each time find
everything changed, everything different.

.

nothing to declare

arrived home from china a few hours ago. the sleeping giant is not asleep at all, let me tell you. i should have posted from there, so many worthy moments. but i had my notebook, so i'll story-fy things soon.

tonight, as i was sorting through the plethora of coins in my passport pouch, i only vaguely recognized a single U.S. dime. it looked familiar, but also not. it's starting already. i am forgetting.

in other news, i feel i have turned a corner. i can't say exactly which corner it is. i couldn't really name it, yet. but let's just say, something has changed. or more carefully, something is changing. i think i am stronger somewhere. i think a new chapter is emerging.