decrescendo

That poem's last line, so moving and intent it seems upon the undoing of every line before, comes close to finishing this thought. The anticipated is often all we can see, remaking the world in our second guesses and heart felt confessions. So when the work is finished and only leaves a hole, the ache it paints is our own. The burden of extinction always upon us as the moments we savor pass into the myth of remembering, each blink another canvas, each nap another life. The sleepless nights, the passionate toiling, the smell of the living soil after a day wrought with rain. The rewrites never end.

Art and life seem so close because we have learned to choose the confusion of one truth rather than the chaos of living amid so many. Our oaths and entanglements often alive only at knifepoint to one another, we feel we fail because we feel so wholly apart from our own ideals. It is that disingenuous pose, the duality of mind/body or body/soul, that sense that we could separate the sunlight from the greenery or the bird on the wing from flight. We have lived, kneeling at the feet of holy fools, confusing their convictions for honesty, and their crimes against being for the truth. Every puzzle is more than pieces, every picture more than color and shape.

Breathless and sweat soaked we mingle for these few moments. We pass the days in earnest contemplation and intent. We kiss with emotion, we kiss with our whole life, we kiss with fury and dull invention. All tooth and tongue and steady gazes, all evocation and mystery and furtive exposition. We part in words that can never capture the lovely ache that parting brings. We part in lessened selves and greater souls, somehow never close at all, somehow never able again to leave. All the phrasings of passion, all the notes of heaven. The air soaked with the heady scent of human hunger. The night full of moonlight and bugs.