Magnitude of Love
On Friday’s, on a white beach, I eat clams from the shell.
On Friday’s I swim in an open bay with friends. Our bodies traced by phosphorescence.
On Friday’s I read the Kanji of stranded seaweed. The markings of love.
…These memories rise, then break like foam on a spent wave.
They play at the crossroad of muscle and neuron like bits of bobbing driftwood–unreachable.
And on that corner, I stand and pray that prayer will take me back there?
It was said of the Baal Shev Tov that one day in a pasture he made sheep stand and pray.
Later, it was reported that he said this altering thing: he said your soul has a wide genealogy, quite apart from you.
When I heard this I wondered if I was ready to believe, that like a school of fish, an ant hill, a black-out of waxwings, a weave of sphagnum, we humans are one organism, the magnitude of which is love?
…Ready, some day, to believe this without a molecule of diminishment for any particular thing?
Perhaps on that day, the nothing we have, will not be taken from us.
On that day, the riddle will transfigure.
On that day, sheep will stand and pray on their own.
And my Friday’s will return.
perhaps, steve, perhaps.
One hope’s…but then I remember, it starts from within my own beating breast.
aye, that it does indeed, that it does indeed.
btw, harper valley’s ‘famous stupid people’ contest is on….give it a whirl. you are allowed one guess per day and one question per day. if you win you get a round the world trip on stephen t. berg’s credit card. ok, not really but you get your name on the side bar as a winner