More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
If you happen to have watched armed men beat and drag your father out the front door of your house and into the back of an idling truck before your mother jerked you from the threshold and buried your face in her skirt folds, try not to judge your mother too harshly. Don’t ask her what she thought she was doing turning a child’s eyes away from history and toward that place all human aching starts.
Or if you think you read in the other, as in a book whose first and last pages are missing, the story of your own birthplace, a country twice erased, once by fire, once by forgetfulness, it probably means you’re standing too close. In any case, try not to let another carry the burden of your own nostalgia or hope.
And if you’re one of those whose left side of the face doesn’t match the right, it might be a clue looking the other way was a habit your predecessors found useful for survival. Don’t lament not being beautiful.
When the wind asks, Have you prayed? I know it’s only me reminding myself a flower is one station between earth’s wish and earth’s rapture, and blood was fire, salt, and breath long before it quickened any wand or branch, any limb that woke speaking. It’s just me in the gowns of the wind, or my father through me, asking, Have you found your refuge yet? asking, Are you happy?
Who hasn’t thought, “Take me with you,” hearing the wind go by? And finding himself left behind, resumed his own true version of time on earth,
That sparrow on the iron railing, not worth a farthing, purchases a realm its shrill cries measure, trading dying for being.
I sang in a church choir during one war American TV made famous. I fled a burning archipelago in the rain, on my mother’s back, in another war nobody televised.
it turns out, now that you’re older at the beginning of a new century, what kept you alive all those years keeps you from living.
It isn’t until he begins to wish to sing the whole flower of his breathing, does he recognize himself, a blossom mortally wounded on its stem.
Maybe being winged means being wounded by infinity, blessed by the ordeal of freedom. At crossroads all the time,
“Go ahead,” I tell her, “close your eyes.” “OK,” she says, “but keep talking.” And so I do. “It isn’t that lovers always speak together in a house by the sea, or in a room with shadows of leaves and branches on the walls and ceiling. It’s that such spaces emerge out of the listening their speaking to each other engenders. I mean, maybe…”
“Maybe it’s true, what sages have said, I don’t know if I’m remembering it right. Something about moving up a ladder of love. Maybe we learn to love a person, say, first as object, and then as presence, and then as essence, and then as disclosure of the divine, or maybe all at the same time, or discovering over time each deeper aspect to be true. And maybe our seeing it in another proves that face inside ourselves.
So we’re dust. In the meantime, my wife and I make the bed. Holding opposite edges of the sheet, we raise it, billowing, then pull it tight, measuring by eye as it falls into alignment between us. We tug, fold, tuck. And if I’m lucky, she’ll remember a recent dream and tell me.
One day we’ll lie down and not get up. One day, all we guard will be surrendered. Until then, we’ll go on learning to recognize what we love, and what it takes to tend what isn’t for our having.
So often, fear has led me to abandon what I know I must relinquish in time. But for the moment, I’ll listen to her dream, and she to mine, our mutual hearing calling more and more detail into the light of a joint and fragile keeping.
She sleeps. And her sleep becomes the river I build my house beside.
Do you love me? she asks. I love you, she answers, and the world keeps beginning.
And in the shadow of our human dream of falling, human voices are Creation’s most recent flowers, mere buds of fire nodding on their stalks.
Passengers with memories of the sea may board leisurely at any unmarked gate.
Your attention please. Under falling petals, never think about home. Seeing begins in the dark. Listening stills us. Yesterday has gone ahead to meet you.
An intrepid perfume is waging our rescue. You may board at either end of Childhood.
