King's bloody Corner

On one side I'm up against the plate glass window of King's Corner at Seattle, Milly's. My other book end is five days of heart gnashing, blissful intensity that could easily withstand a nuclear implosion.
I would be lying if I told you I wasn't sore. [I hadn't even gone inside after you left when Faith slunk around the corner; but she is not at all well & there's gunk oozing out of one eye; she wants to bite me & Mika.]
After you left I spent time appreciating our new home: I touched, I remembered, I loved, I photographed.
Without bathing, I left for Seattle; I didn't want to be alone then, as much as I wanted to be alone.
What I need right now is to sit in the eye of the storm, while sun burnt strangers at this crossroads swirl noiselessly around me, while I write. [How do I even begin to process the ragged, bloody-raw bliss-fullness of my nerve ends?]
This is whole-hearted, God-centred stuff... thank God. And you.

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'Death': For Pearl van Wyk

TEXT WRITTEN BY A PRIEST IN 1918:
'Death means nothing at all…I have only slipped away into the next room, I am I, and you are you. Whatever we were to each other, we are still.
Call me by my old familiar name; speak to me in the easy way we always used; put no difference in your tone; wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow.
Laugh, as always laughed at the little jokes we enjoyed together.
Play, smile; think of me. Pray for me. Let my name be the household word that it always was. Let it be spoken without effort, without trace of shadow in it.
Life means all that it was ever meant; it is the same as it ever was…there is absolutely unbroken continuity. Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight? I am waiting for you, for an interval somewhere very near, just around the corner.
All is well. Nothing is past, nothing is lost. One brief moment and all will be as it was before.'

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i carry your heart with me

Sitting alone, I'm eating chocolate mousse cake, and drinking cafe mocha, but for two.
I'm surrounded by couples who no longer notice each other, whose eyes constantly peel off other relationship's clothes. Hungry eyes as Sixties jazz is piped through bookstore speakers; it's a moody Sunday afternoon.
I've been looking forward to Christmas since last year; this time it arrived without fanfare; slipping in through the back door it didn't even disturb the flies. Gaudy-expensive decorations - primary colour red, keywords 'passion' & 'sizzle' - glitter cheaply in the un-spontaneous sunshine.
A good corporate woman at the next table wades through a file thick of emails. She's proud of dedicating all seven days of every week to her career; it shows on her smug, self-satisfied slave-face. (A slender apple core on her table stains itself brown from green and looking back, I've no doubt, on orchard days. My bet is that it was organically grown, just like the once-were-fir-trees that are now printed emails. A whole thick file full.)
It's my turn to have my clothes peeled off: this by a hungry-looking, wolf-like faced young guy over there. Smashing his 'sexy' facade, he reeks of the neediness scratched across his smooth face.
On Thursday night an 80-year woman (riddled with bed sores) died from kidney failure in a provincial hospital ward for one. Next year April she would've been married for 50 years. Last week I'd visited her and prayed that she wouldn't be staying long; '7 score and 10' is a long time to keep on smiling.
'Love and marriage, love and marriage, go together like a horse and carriage,' croons some velvet-voiced sixties dude (ha-ha, imagine!) over the same speakers (surely this can't be good for book and mag sales?).
If I wasn't in love I'd probably have slit my wrists in the sterile, extraordinarily expensive toilet next-door.

For you, my love, from YOU:

i carry your heart with me

i carry your heart with me (i carry it in my heart)
i am never without it (anywhere i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear no fate (for you are my fate,my sweet)
i want no world (for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide) and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)

ee cummings

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