My Mystic

– a falconry of seraphim
– the shrapnel of silence
– a stack of dark clouds
– a fistful of light
– a translucent mirror
These are basic tools for the mystic.

Mystics are not special.
Like all of us, they need coffee, go to the washroom,
get a little bitchy when one of their seven-times-a-day
gets interrupted.

We rightfully ask,
what use are they? what is their role?

It’s a question they love
to leave unanswered, as though that were the answer.

I befriended one once. I’m not sure what I was thinking.
I scolded myself: it’s not like getting a pet.

Like many, he was shoeless and profoundly homeless.
Living arrangements were not surprising, he only wanted a closet
in the basement.

We rarely spoke, which I anticipated. Once I asked him about his day.
“I deal in appearances and realities,” he said.

I said, “Reality is like my body, solid with water, and surface areas,
what’s more real than that?”

He was as quiet as Christ.
Then stepped through the closed door and went downstairs.

Later that year I saw him sitting on the front step, sipping air. I yelled,
“You have no idea! Up here it’s every organism for itself!”

“Follow me,” he said. We went downstairs.
He opened the closet. It was a madhouse of connections.

Just a week later he appeared in the grey of the evening,
while I was clearing dinner dishes.
“I have news from the edge,” he said, “none of us
are loved enough.”

I broke down.
He hugged me.
Then left my house.

I watched him
make his way down the sidewalk,
as he slowly vanished.