Per Fumum

through the smoke of a life half-lived

Photo Credit: Me

“Where is the lightning to lick you with its tongue? Where is the frenzy with which you should be inoculated?”

-Zarathustra

Do you remember me, life? It has been so long since we have been in the same room together. But I am here with you now. I see how much has been rearranged. How much is missing and what is gathering dust. I see the book we began when I drew my first breath. I have brought my ink and pen. I am ready to write the next page.

Here is how the story must go:

I see my shadows everywhere coming home to swallow me, but I do not even recognize them anymore. No matter what direction the light, they are always sneaking up to strangle me. And I am quivering and captive, like someone blindfolded waiting for a bullet.

Even now, in the pitch of night, there is a darker shade edging its cold, pitted body against my body and whispering. “Be not afraid. This is the part of the dying where you will be born again.”

To whom do I owe my allegiance? The Cult of Lazarus. To the faith of resurrection. What is left still buried under the broken crown of that alabaster goddess standing guard at the entrance of this withered garden? I push the boulder away from the mouth of the cavern. I stumble out still wrapped in my funeral clothes.

I tell you this, there is some new life prowling in these veins. I feel it in the hearts of the shriveled roses, petals black as night’s body, with thorns still so hungry for blood. In the string of scallop shells that Mary threaded around my neck before they anointed me. And in the cracked vessels leaking the dark, sweet wine pooling on the cavern floor.

But I am still trying to find my way through this second life. Hunting in the brittle grass and finding all these meager scraps to keep me from this famine I have brought upon myself.

Today, there was a Cooper’s hawk perched on the cedar fence outside my home. Close enough to see the mad hunt in those blood-red eyes, him cocking his head left, then right in scrutiny of this resurrected soul, and me as quiet and still as a field mouse. Before he suddenly launched into the air with a great burst of wing, mangling the sky like a scythe.

There is so much less needed to being alive than we want to believe. Less and better. I curse this most human thing in the world: to take something simple and true and make it an impossible lie.

It has taken me too long to open to these tiny things—all so full of gods. The barbed curve of the foxtail leaf cupping a bead of dew. The fearless pirouette of an autumn leaf piercing the skin of the unbroken lake. The raven bending the ivy, angling his oily crown, oblivion eyes holding me in silent regard.

What do I now become?

I came down here to believe in love, and not just any love, but that cacophonous love that brings down the walls of this idolatrous self. And I hear it now. Everywhere I turn there is something being toppled in me.

And now I find that I am well past the years that I believed would belong to me, and that I have buried so many seeds alongside these sorrows. Why does sadness sprout so quickly with an invasive head of poison leaves when all those sweet and lazy joys take their time to reveal themselves, almost missing the season altogether? And why have I chased all these angels away from the gates and invited so many demons to sit at the table with me?

No more.

Let this become the story of a solitary rebellion, deep in the forest of a tyrannical past.

And this the part of the story where those who are still alive believe they have no way of holding out. But still, they find a way. They always do. And they win their savage and bloody freedom in the end.

Let this be the story of how I descended and return again. Not the swift and graceful plunging of that blood-eyed hawk, but the free fall of an impetuous child who learned to fly too soon and burned his wings trying to kiss the sun.

This is the question I must keep asking myself: Have I returned as much as I have taken from this life? And let the answer keep punching into the pit of my stomach, making me want to not only kiss that far away sun, but swallow it whole in hopes of being shadowless again someday.

So, I will watch the grass become pliant with green. I will see the yearling fuzz thicken on the magnolia seeds. And the sparrows’ gossip grow louder in the leafless privet hedges.

And remember it is not just my life being resurrected. It is my companion earth as well, pushing up the promises of future green. And I can feel the fingers of her roots moving under my feet, spreading in the cold, black dirt.

I, too, am digging deeper to grow higher. I, too, am preparing for a sun I know is coming home to us.

And here is where the frenzy sings:

To my heart and the iron I will never make of it no matter how much it is hammered.

To this hard season, fading but clinging to yesterday’s vanity like a ruined starlet.

To the words that began the world.

A whisper — light — and every moment after a voice echoing into the furthest reaches of what might still be dark. Resounding and illuminating the outermost boundaries of all that is dark.

To that bright goddess Venus in the night-bruised sky, kissing the uppermost leaves of my ligneous heart. Revealing my trembling poverty within this infinitely vast richness of being.

I climb high enough to see where I have been and to see beneath me the valley of what is yet possible unfurling like some great, green banner. The fields freckled with wildflowers and a warm wind swaying the long foxtails like copper lanterns in the summer sun.

I no longer lament the wilted petals of the black-eyed Susans fluttering like half-masted mourning flags. I rejoice in the cool furrow of sweat running down my chest, over my stomach, through the tangled black forest of pubic hairs, as I sit in air as thick as wool. The sun branding every inch of my skin, while this one and only measure of life races through my fingers like sand.

I swear that I am learning to love this broken soul—welding the pieces back into place. And I am giving clean asylum to this heart, scurrying up my leg and hunting for a corner of my life to re-weave a home. And I am cleaning the blood, finally congealing over wounds that have been bleeding since I learned I was filled with life.

My bare feet are pressed into a billion years of cool, soft night and I am watching the silver waves, and I have no fear about their tarnishing.

And there, a tremulous wind dances the toothy leaves of the mulberry. Silent breath exhales spring’s first green ascent.

Reckless, I, too, dive into the fertile breach of now.

My eyes open to every eternal return and I, too, begin to shrink the shadow of once terrible things, rehearsing the rhythm of earth’s enrobing measure.

One final crescendo of color.

Comets of goldenrod turning to dust.

Anything to keep the seasons moving. To fall and wilt but hope and grow again.

To give undying purpose for my eyes and my ears and my nose and my tongue and my senses entire and gorge myself relentlessly on this ceaseless feast of life. Sitting at the banquet table wolfing down mouthfuls of being as though I may never eat a single scrap again.

And, my vow is this: I will no longer be content to suck the marrow out of life. I will chew the fucking bones.

And closing, I will curl like the fingers of summer’s hand.

Like God, I will make a fist of light before I fall.