Perhaps in childhood when nights you waited at the
foot of your bed, watching the moths draw their circumference around the
streetlight as the stars fell, you listened to the quiet pumping of crickets
and cicadas and wondered at the dense darkness of the forest below; and you
caught a whiff of disappointment and it came from God; you had thought his
great arm had reached across the road that shines like a snake at night,
bringing a small offering of light, some jewel from a crown, but when God
opened his palm in the solitude of your room, you beheld nothing. It was then
that you turned to the wall and out of its paper, the roses, the carriages; the
long, billowing skirts like down-turned umbrellas; it was all life that took
your breath away, night after night out of paper, and the horses again and
again their curved legs and hooves were all pieces of that magnificent moving
alphabet.
Maybe every childhood is braided with quiescence: moments when a grey-blue
haze enfolds the hum of the house, muffles the dog’s bark. Lakes sleep without a ripple. Suddenly a harsh flutter of
ragged black wings erupts as an awkward shape emerges from the delicacy of the silent
lake. Your question is the gaze you turn toward it. Its answer has no need to
push or prove itself.