Soundings

A resonating vibration in my bones says there’s something here.
Or is that just an echo of longing from other times, other places.
Can’t it be both, and is that so bad, even as
loneliness has become the air that I breathe?

A thirteen month old child with retinal cancer has his eyes removed.
He learns to navigate the world by clicking his tongue
in a kind of echolocation, like a bat or dolphin.
Something is there. And there.

What soundings can plumb a heart?

I listen to my bones but wonder if my body has become an unreliable narrator.
My brain is a plate of scrambled eggs and corned beef hash passing itself off as a gourmet meal.
My heart, dark and red and sloshing, is a double agent,
trading secrets between body and brain, keeping its opinions to itself.

Subterranean rivers can be found all over the world.
We walk the earth’s surface, oblivious to the torrents of water rushing beneath us.
In California, a strip of green in the middle of a desert is your only clue that the Mojave River roars below.

Can you hear it, feel it vibrating in your bones?

My war within is a struggle for story.
I yearn for, and am suspicious of, narratives of Intentionality and Certainty.
It’s fear, again, talking out of both sides of a slippery mouth.
Fear of rejection, or more unnerving, fear of acceptance, love.

A heart pinging, and then listening, for echoes.

Is it so hard to embrace the messiness of love, the illusion of permanence?
This air that I breathe. What do I know?
Truth is a house in need of constant repair, and love is its victory garden where you get your hands dirty, reap what you sow.