...and it dawned upon me like assuagement that comes as your hand finds the water glass in the dark fumbling around waking in a way from unfathomable sleep with a thirst so deep like profound ache or nausea that runs through the whole of you and occupies your body like an incoming tide, that same tide that draws your dream out to sea leaving you abandoned because you are now increasingly awake, alive to your thirst and ache and nausea of your mind but you fall back into it, out of it, into it, out again, until it is one, all of it, consumes you like an irresistible melody that you hear with your ears but emanates from your center and seems to climb the steps of grace and resonates irreparably and rings true in the corners of your being so that it constitutes the entirety of all that you understand life to be and all that you presume death to be, life and death melded as one, life and death as a conundrum, a singularity, and it gives you joy and dread and perspective and sense, much like a psalm of ascent as you relinquish the past and fumble toward the future through tragedy and hope, looking back, looking forward, floating upon the downy wings of a psalm chanted by sages long ago, the words having reached across time through ancient air and you let the words ring in your mind as you read them from the page, embossed as they are in bruised blue ink, aligned in simple rhyming rows, amen, amen, amen, and they fly into your eyes, transcend the day-to-day, rise despite the drag of gravity wrought by old tragedies still fresh in mind and groans that echo through history and plans and contingencies and conversation, idle and profound, that lie along the narrow corridor that separates breathing life from death inert, the long hallway you can’t cross but once, beyond the crisis of sleep when streams of dreams steer you along that dark tunnel as you feel that same tired tide rise and fade in your ears and eyes though it's you speaking to you, upsetting you, your essential self, setting order to the circumstances that comprise the entirety of things you know and expect, year after year, the normal things, the things that are, the things you imagine those things to be, the things that are both common and unusual but conspire as a protocol that you can accept because they seem familiar or resemble familiar things but now you’ve sailed beyond all that as you read it, taste it, hear it in your head and listen to the whole of its parts and the parts of the whole, over and over again, never enough, amen, amen, amen, the overriding structure and all its aspects constituting something you know is the truest thing you’ve known thus far, practically too much to bear, disjointed bones of a stilled skeleton splayed across time, the bones and joists unseen until today, forming a reality that was abstract until the moment those words rested within you and thereupon became as real as any possession or desire or pain or comfort known to you in the years of life leading up to this and, in this way, it all becomes greater than experience, greater than considered reality and transcends all that constitutes the known and expected because it is sublime, it is you, was you, continues to be you and will always be you as time molds you as you stalk through it as though you were walking headlong into a driving wind that hurls drops of rain against your hapless body as you intensify your efforts to make your way and it becomes you, is now and was then, all the seconds that were the moments that came before and all the seconds that now become moments yet to come while sitting on a chair or thrown to the floor or lying in the sand as the bits and pieces of disparate voices of men and women and children chant the words that hover and float, linger and fly like seagulls in the night, over you, over me, over white haired women who walk the beach and stiff old men who trudge along uneven streets, over sailors who long for land and birds who yearn for the sight of a branch and fish who swim in ceaseless circles driven as they are by the circles themselves, beyond understanding as the order of things wraps its dull arms around them and raises the ground like a plow through the field leaving crimped lines along the furrows like long mounds of time that dry and are cast off and hurled by the wind into the night like scales that fly from the skin of a fish supine upon the cutting board, suffering in life, loving life, craving deliverance without realizing or understanding the nature of want or the relentless craving that rises from some undefinable part of one’s core, scanning the waves like a searchlight for some semblance of redemption, a promise that comes to each as each is born into the world, promises linked each to each like an endless vine as the amalgam of generations crush those that are piled beneath, each reaching out for whatever will come, longing for all that one can’t long for, reaching for all that is known and all that can beknown and wasn't known and won’t be known, buried infirm as the plow combs their backs and makes their furrows long, amen, amen, amen, all in a moment’s time that cannot be remembered and looms as real as tears that stream from your eyes as words of a psalm come alive, line by line, and lift themselves from the page, words murmured by sages whose names are long forgotten, words that breathe, words that take root, words that rise from the ground and jettison their husks and are threshed like wheat as you and I walk through town and cross the street, wait for deliverance at a traffic light after endless waiting as it changes in a flash from red to green, amen, amen, amen...

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