liturgy of the hours
the right hand migrates instinctively in slow, bestirring movements: fingers cold, close-clipped, and inked with the healing stain of turmeric (an ayurvedic poultice), marked thus with ministration, catch tears that trace the contours from cheek to eyes still-closed. the ache of dreams carried over like memories of a past life. awakening at dusk after twenty-two hours of sickly sleep, rifted even from diurnal cycles, a world only of night and transitory sun. (how, then, to sanctify the day by canonical hour?)
the tightened strings of electricity (curling fingers, contracting arm) occur even in slumber, embraced too into the particular vividness of dreams born of fever and isolation. there are visions still of kindness, the outstretched palm, the resting touch. the radiating aura of pain becomes an enveloping, extracorporeal body, starved of human contact (its exhilarating nearness, its astonishing presence) -- responding with a whole and exquisite trust, whispering "come close." love as opening and assent. may it be done to me according to your word.
sleep and its illusory comfort. electric strings contract puppeted limbs. in this way, we renounce attachment to the body -- offering ownership, control, and fear as fuel too for the fire of love to consume, a meditation on fullest surrender. a deep somatic lightning pierces even the dream. the man who nurtures, the gentle companion, is not real: an imaginary clemency granted me by my own mind. seeing my distress, he responds not with dread or revulsion but with loving entreaty. an opening of heart from which come compassion, tenderness, the eagerness to ask and to offer, the unloosed and immediate desire to Give; eyes whose gaze is too shockingly kind to meet. i am bound by an experience of body so small and constrained, in which even unconscious processes are made conscious as they are taken away -- i cannot speak. "what does it mean when you cannot speak?" he asks, with a look of imploring goodness. i point toward a printed emergency protocol, one copy framed on the wall and the other in my wallet. each movement a dialogue with muscles and limbs, a quiet plead, a persuasion. one hand closes into a silent, frozen gesture, as in iconography, communicating much by the placement of fingers, the angle of wrist and palm. what does it mean when you cannot speak? invitatory: open my lips, and my mouth will proclaim your praise.
i wake mute with a paralyzed left arm, awaiting the gradual return of speech and movement, acclimating again (after the sting of temporary, imagined relief) to a daily life of hostility and seclusion. outside, night begins to blossom, the dark hoarfrost-flower. the practice of waiting asks for complete, attentive presence, an utter clarity of being, even -- especially -- when the waiting will pass. i lie alone in a room lit only by the wintered blue of dusk: the cold, elliptic light and shallow sun of gloaming, of northern latitudes. there is the painful enormity of loneliness, surpassed only by the painful enormity of all-encompassing love.
the tightened strings of electricity (curling fingers, contracting arm) occur even in slumber, embraced too into the particular vividness of dreams born of fever and isolation. there are visions still of kindness, the outstretched palm, the resting touch. the radiating aura of pain becomes an enveloping, extracorporeal body, starved of human contact (its exhilarating nearness, its astonishing presence) -- responding with a whole and exquisite trust, whispering "come close." love as opening and assent. may it be done to me according to your word.
sleep and its illusory comfort. electric strings contract puppeted limbs. in this way, we renounce attachment to the body -- offering ownership, control, and fear as fuel too for the fire of love to consume, a meditation on fullest surrender. a deep somatic lightning pierces even the dream. the man who nurtures, the gentle companion, is not real: an imaginary clemency granted me by my own mind. seeing my distress, he responds not with dread or revulsion but with loving entreaty. an opening of heart from which come compassion, tenderness, the eagerness to ask and to offer, the unloosed and immediate desire to Give; eyes whose gaze is too shockingly kind to meet. i am bound by an experience of body so small and constrained, in which even unconscious processes are made conscious as they are taken away -- i cannot speak. "what does it mean when you cannot speak?" he asks, with a look of imploring goodness. i point toward a printed emergency protocol, one copy framed on the wall and the other in my wallet. each movement a dialogue with muscles and limbs, a quiet plead, a persuasion. one hand closes into a silent, frozen gesture, as in iconography, communicating much by the placement of fingers, the angle of wrist and palm. what does it mean when you cannot speak? invitatory: open my lips, and my mouth will proclaim your praise.
i wake mute with a paralyzed left arm, awaiting the gradual return of speech and movement, acclimating again (after the sting of temporary, imagined relief) to a daily life of hostility and seclusion. outside, night begins to blossom, the dark hoarfrost-flower. the practice of waiting asks for complete, attentive presence, an utter clarity of being, even -- especially -- when the waiting will pass. i lie alone in a room lit only by the wintered blue of dusk: the cold, elliptic light and shallow sun of gloaming, of northern latitudes. there is the painful enormity of loneliness, surpassed only by the painful enormity of all-encompassing love.