Occasional Like That
We are not the complexity our body is,
nor the summer air idling in the big maple without purpose.
We are a shape the wind makes in these leaves as it
passes through. We are not the wood any more than the fire,
but the heat which is a marriage between the two.
We are certainly not the lake nor the fish in it,
but the something that is pleased by them.
We are the stillness when a mighty Mediterranean noon
subtracts even the voices of insects by the broken farmhouse.
We are evident when the orchestra plays, and yet are not part of the
strings or brass. Like the song that exists only in the singing,
and is not the singer.
God does not live among the church bells but is briefly resident there.
We are occasional like that.
A lifetime of easy happiness mixed with pain and loss, trying always
to name and hold on to the enterprise under way in our chest.
Reality is not what we marry as a feeling.
It is what walks up the dirt path, through the excessive heat and
giant sky, the sea stretching away.
He continues past the nunnery to the old villa where he will sit
on the terrace with her, their sides touching.
In the quiet that is the music of that place, which is the difference
between silence and windlessness.
