You have dismembered the newspaper, and its innards are in disarray upon the breakfast table. Egg grease is seeping through the sports section. You are reading aloud to me from an article on motoring. The drama in your voice creates an interest in the piece.

You ask: All of this jargon! Whatever could it mean? I shrug my shoulders. You give it even greater mystery, I say. I should never care to know what any of it means as long as you read it to me. You make it sound so very sincere. I trust it to mean whatever you say it does.

You take a long drink of your coffee. It is tepid and frothy – easy to drink quickly. When you are finished, you give a sigh of satisfaction, reach for the hair at the rear of my head and rub it absent-mindedly.

You know, you say after looking at your empty cup for a moment, there are many people who claim that they cannot start their day without their caffeine hit.

This is true, I say. I have heard it said.

Well, you say, putting your cup on the table before taking my face between your hands, I cannot start my day without you. In fact, if you were not in the beginning of my day, husband-man, I should be lost.

After holding onto your coffee cup for so long, your hands are extra warm on my cheeks.

TO BE CONTINUED…

You have taught me that breakfast is a ceremony. You say morning is itself a ceremony.

Look, you say. An egg contains the whole of creation. When you crack open an egg, you crack open a universe.

I say: I am not so sure about that.

While I toast bread and brew coffee, you poach eggs, humming, and rubbing your backside against mine. It feels good, and is one of the reasons why I don’t want a bigger kitchen just yet.

When we are sitting at the table with our breakfast served, you cut off some poached egg on toast, place it on a fork, and ask me to open my mouth.

The yolk is runny and warm, and you chase a dribble of it away from my chin with your tongue, and kiss me. The taste of you in my breakfast is enormous, and I smile.

Now, I say, if you want to crack open a universe, that’s the best place to start.

TO BE CONTINUED…

On the porch, we sit on the top step and gaze at the moon. It is big in the sky, close to the horizon, magnified. We are silent, and I can sense a great wonder taking flight in you.

You adjust your position on the step, and our little fingers touch – the faintest of touches. In such moments it is as though our whole bodies collide.

What, you ask, is the moon made of?

I am not wise, I say, and I believe that you may find the correct answer in many books in many libraries of many men wiser than I.

Your head leans into my shoulder and you whisper: I am not concerned with the answers of many wise men. I only wish to know: what do you think the moon is made of?

I pause. I am always stunned by the attention in your voice. I must not search for the correct answer, but for the answer that pays the highest tribute to your wonder.

For anything to keep an orbit with as much faith as the moon has, I venture, it can only be made of devotion.

TO BE CONTINUED…

I have observed others, fleeing from the figurative epicenters of their lives – unenlightened – rushing headlong into the next, new catastrophe as though nomads of personal crisis.

I would rather remain in the disaster area – to transform it into a site of profound archaeology – to piece together a logical culture of collapse from the ruins. To sift and scrape; to brush away the detritus of failure from the shards, bones, and artefacts of togetherness: to bring forth a revelation from the body of morass.

Time Is An Iron Distance – Dante In Exile

She must be as the crossing of a great desert: the constant irritation of a prolonged thirst. A coil of razor wire in the throat; the barbed question one is cursed to travel with, unanswered.

Time is an iron distance. Such is the fate of exiles.

You are loved by many who are not present, and though you cannot feel this love, it exists and is real. Today we celebrate the great romance of your life, of how you bring light into the lives of all who have beheld you, of how you never swim apart from the great love, but always within its bosom.

The Sleep Of Great Love

As evening falls on this day, and each beyond it, you are loved by many who are not present. In sleep you are surrounded, and will never sleep apart from this great love. The peace that falls upon you will be the peace of great love. As you awake to many new dawns, so too will the courage of great love go with you. Your heart of great love will illuminate the world.

Today we celebrate the great romance of your life, sweet child.

To be a tree is to be beyond articulation. That act of being – the branching skyward, the harmony with the cycle of seasons, the rich entanglement with the earth – cannot be understood by any being other than the tree. Even between the oak and the maple the exchange is foreign. The mysteries and pleasures of being an oak is left to the oak alone: isolated; exquisite; unique.

The Love Tree

To love you is to love beyond articulation. Love has no common tongue – there are descriptions for feelings, yes – all descriptions are tied to experience, all are strung from different points of a language in constant flux. My love has not been an experience of love; it has been an experience of you. It has no words. It can only be known by the tree: harmonious; entangled; branching skyward.

The Whirlpool Galaxy

The little god floated through The Whirlpool Galaxy in a listless manner, distressed with the contamination of love with chaos. He squeezed himself continually through the black hole at the galaxy’s center, becoming idle with his disappointment. This continued on for some millenia, and for a time the universe was left to its own creation, growing wilder…

It has been seen in dreams: death is to swim beneath water that has an impenetrable surface, facing upwards, an open parachute trailing behind like a submerged hurricane. The movements of all other beings in the afterlife are eased by flow: I am tasked with fighting against drag and current for eternity.

A Lithe Salmon Flashes Skywards

You, admiring the anemones and pincered beasts of the shallows, never look down upon my craving face; my wails cannot rise as even small bubbles through the immersion. I will watch you walk away from the shoreline in a perpetual loop, ever yearning to flash skywards into your thin air like a lithe salmon.

The little god took his time. He would retreat to the galaxy frequently, seeking perfection beyond perfection. Once he was adamant that the design for love was exactly as he had felt it, he decided that he could do nothing else but commence its creation. It was to be the longest process in the infinite universe.

How will the hands knead? How soft a gaze? How open, or guarded, a heart?

The little god would mix equal parts of spirit with sensation; in countless combinations he would mix touch, breath, and speech; he would develop names for intimacy in every tongue; he would create storge; friendship; and altruism. Through eons of wild nights on a young earth, the little god spent each moment on his masterpiece, and the complexity of it kept him from all other acts of creation.

An instant must grip the flesh like lightning. There must be a moment of irreversible rapture…