A Brief Inventory At Five A.M.

There were increasingly more mysteries than he could get his head around.

The puzzle of texture, pattern, and repetition. The idiot wonder prompted by even the most prosaic mosaic or randomly occurring stain. Prompts, responses, and resolute silences from the interior continent. Sounds of no clear origin. Desires of no clear etc.

Desires. Desire.

The absence of desire.

The incomprehensibility of all transmission, whether of blood, belief, truth, or information.

The magic of a phonograph record, compact disc, or photograph.

The process of ruin and deterioration. Erosion, the real deal and the metaphor.

The slow dazzle of contentment.

The planet’s tantrums and stoic productions.

The involuntary heresies of the hobbled heart.

The helpless disgrace of despair.

The missing things, the absence of, etc.

The tragedy of memory and forgetting.

The fact that even a telescope can’t find tomorrow, that even a microscope can’t make sense of yesterday.

The blood-muddling transformations, defeats, and ecstasies possible in a single moment.

The strange human resistance to the merely practical.

The drab compromises and uneasy pacts.

The irresistible persuasion of percussion.

The takeaway prerogative of fate.

The way that water moves, travels, falls, settles, or sits still.

Some agreed upon sense in the second hand, that we pretend to recognize or understand time.

That we choose to believe this is all real.

That we choose to believe.

That we reach out.

That we pull away.

That we fall.

That we get back up.

That we go on.

That by tomorrow every single one of us might be gone forever, and in a hundred years the sound of our laughter, the touch of our hands, and the stories we paid for with our lives will be forgotten by every breathing thing still living.

That this is where we are: Here.

That this is what we have: Now.

That this is who we are: Who?

That this is what we want: What?

E…T…C.

Let us each tattoo a rising sun on our heart.

—Harry Crosby, “Tattoo”

Imagination is that around which

Mysteries assemble for devotion.

It believes everything, even reason,

Which denies everything. Pay attention.

—James Galvin, from “Reading the Will”