Labyrinth

We have forgotten the way
through the five-petal path,
our feet calloused
and eyes grown pale.

Just because it was here,
we walked it.

We remember only the spiral
that lives in the walls,
our tongues silent
and fingers too wise.

Just because we cannot leave,
does not mean we wish to.

A Little Problem

Toothpick in his mouth, the pest control man hooked his thumbs in his jumpsuit. “Okay. So, what you’ve got is a Death Weasel infestation.”

A small orange rodent with too many sharp teeth edged near the man’s foot. He kicked it against the wall, absentmindedly.

The house-owner, cowering on his coffee table, grimaced. “Is—is that going to be expensive?”

“As far as price goes—” The exterminator stiffened and looked down at his hand. “A scratch! They’ll smell the blood—”

A wave of Death Weasels burst into the room. They leapt on the exterminator, quickly overpowering him and stripping his carcass to the bone. Finished, they looked at the man on the coffee table.

He frantically dialed the next pest control listing.

Meaning

For what, is the grass?

The grass is here to be grass,
to be green or blonde
in the rain or sun,
to grow sweetly or not at all,
covering the earth
or fighting a few tendrils through the rock—
just to be grass,
as the rock is here to be rock.

But people—
for what, are people?
We do not know,
anymore than we understand what it is just to be people,
to grow as the grass grows,
stand as the rock stands.

Is it any wonder
that we weep?

But then. . .
we are not grass.
We are not rock.
Perhaps. . .
perhaps that is what we are.
More than grass.
More than rock.

As much myth as meat.

The Sea of Faith Was Once, Too, at the Full

God went into the water because he was tired.

So tired.

He went down to the purest river he could find and just slid into it, first as the corporeal body he had taken so that he could walk barefoot in the grass, and then he dissolved it and let his spirit fill the spaces between the water’s molecules.

God listened to the hydrogen and the oxygen atoms talk to each other, and he loved them, because they did not even know that he was there. So he floated with them around the world a million times, from north to south to east to west, and he was happy.

And then God went into a glacier. There, in the ice, he watched as the gravel ebbed and flowed through it, as bacteria stared him straight in the face and then squirmed through his crystallized form. The debris and the bacteria made patterns, patterns that he did not need to control, and he loved it.

The swamps, the puddles, the heavy clouds that hang in the sky—God visited them all. And each tiny stream, the moisture that coats windows and slithers down laden glasses, and the ponds in deep caves where blind fish swim in evolutionary circles, all of these; God lived in them, and laughed in them, and he heard a million tiny conversations of joy and fear and anger and hope.

God went home, and remembered how his people were made mostly of water, and he loved us again. He knew that we deserved him, and he deserved us as well.

Then he gave rain to the whole world, and the sun.

It was a beautiful rainbow.















Bonus: the song I was thinking of http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_FjmnzsW0M.

(Yes, I tried to link it, but apparently that was too difficult.)