Leaves

from the collection of: d. heidel

Causing disruption or worry, apprehension, perturbation…

Do you know the feeling of r’s rolling around your mouth?  A sound you cannot touch but only come near to?  You will never know it, never apprehend it.  You will merely worry about it, perturb the air around it.

You will sit and wonder – have I done enough?  And, all the same, you will be destroyed.  The earth is ending.  Humanity is no more.  Pain is so deep that the prideful are only proud of their soullessness.  In this way, they can dismember children and still smile.

I can tell you that there is no glory.  And what, exactly, do I mean by this?  (Let me try rolling it around my mouth a bit…)

I heard a poem once, “Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer…”  And what was it that he meant by that?  I heard another poem once, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice…”  (All is poetry.  All meaning is bent toward something else.)

Is it just that the falcon’s turning is too long for us to see?  So long, in fact, that it seems apocalyptic?  There is no center.  I cannot touch the meaning.  I am losing it. 

These contemplations were meant to save.  And yet, I am undone.  My loins spill out over my waistband.  Liquid through the gash.  Like an r over the tongue.  The ocean rolls over the shore.  And all returns.  And all is one.  And all is done.