oh my god

Seems I've just tuned into the literary channel, but I'm crossing signals with God, God, and more God. I'm nearly certain this is one of those psych 101 instances of my seeking out what I want to find, that whole clinical phenom in which subjects note the hits rather than the misses.

I know that the Karen Armstrong armies have been out there for eons, scribbling away about the heavens, furiously debating on our souls and other celestial whatnots. I know I'm influenced by this window of atonement we have happening. I know my mind's on higher power since Liam Rector committed suicide.

Word had it that the East Coast crew had twenty readers lined up for his memorial, the send-off of a slipper soul, and that was just the formal roster. I imagine wine and tears and all sorts of exaggerations of intimate familiarity. We so excel at loving what we've lost.

For our part on the West Coast, we were a starchy group, just one weepy breakdown on the part of the small man whose name I forget across the table from me. His partner made a hell of a lime tart. I had two pieces, some nuts, a little bubble water. Between you and me, the poem I read was one that I thought Liam might not have wanted to hear. I thought he'd appreciate someone resisting brief solemnity.

Others read other's work:

It Is Night. It Is Very Dark.
Jane Hirschfield

Rainfall past any interrogation.
Questions and answers are not the business of rain.Yet I step forward by them
Left foot? Yes. Right foot? Yes.
And all the time wanting to be soaked through
as the flowers of the apricot that open too early,
in mid-December,
are soaked all the way through their slow petals but do not fall.
The colors only slightly deepen.
The fruit has far to travel.
Left foot by right foot under the hidden stars.
And I?
Question by question,
like an elephant trained to paint what is in her heart.