OMG, Part 2

“…this is how we are made: to be inextricably bound; to come from; to belong to, and with, and for; to have heart and soul and all those oceanic metaphors always tied to another, to others; so when we are left alone, we are not alone, and when we are not alone, we are left alone; so when we reach, sometimes we touch.”  

—published below (December 2)

Unfortunately, we are also made to retch.

And follow columns of smoke or stone, following behind so we’re not choked or crushed, given the way things always move. Whether made to burn or stand, they always move, however long it may take.

Though it’s often quite fast, the burning and the crushing.

And there’s this thing about evil – it helps to say it comically, a deep reverb, a voice that knows it’s funny. Evil! Unfortunately often it’s not funny, as far from funny as can be, here in the minds, our minds, where these ideas are dreamed up and given form in the telling and the sharing and convincing. In the joining of raging cause.

Yes, I’m talking about war. Land battles. Circles drawn thick.

Today, a pagan holiday adopted by an Abrahamic religion in a manner that can make the day twinkle, though some may oppose this sentiment, my dear favorite interlocutor and I went for a walk on a snowy road. Soon we noticed droplets of blood along the way, every few feet, red on the white. First suspicion: a nosebleed. Now, thinking about it, that sounds unlikely – wouldn’t you notice and stop it? Later suspicion: an injured animal, forest animal. Or maybe someone’s pomegranate juice leaking? But in droplets like that? And bright on the snow’s surface like that? In between, I have a deep reverb movie vision of a man stomping out of the woods crazy and murderous. Fortunately, none such appears. We couldn’t quite tell where the blood droplets started or stopped. There were gaps. There was never a lot (of blood, juice, or sign of something, whatever it was). My strolling companion said she was ignoring it. Baker Brook is so magical in the ice and snow. At one point I thought, should I do something? Not seriously. What would I do?

Our fingers got cold…we’d brought gloves not mittens. Details to chew on like the nails of the nervous. Terrors to ignore like anything you like.

Thinking about my mom all day. Yesterday I had a vision of her insulting a poem of mine, in words first mean, then arrogant. She could be like that. Today I missed her, the only one who would really care about any detail I would share about the two grandsons we gave her; how she loved me and needed me, more and more, til her end, which she fought so furiously as the cancer finished what her many years started – she needed my ear most of all.

Today I finished a book by a distant relative of my walking companion (bringing the nonfiction account all that much closer). It was (and is) about a ghetto burnt to hell and the people in the end fighting to their end, because there was nothing better to do, and sometimes it’s better to go down swinging, even killing. That’s a bad fact. Because only rarely do you really know who you’re swinging at. And yet you swing, and sometimes even kill, because in that moment you must.