Sky

Fog this morning. Last night was clear: as I walked to the bus stop the full moon ghosted between the building tops.

Wrung and worn with love. In the last three years I've exhausted as many lifetimes: I am older than the earth. And yet younger than I have ever been. My leaves, if you could see them, are tender and Spring green. I've stopped trying to understand it.

Death is always with me. I look around Tosi's and see all the customers as they'll be in their coffins, slack-faced and shrunken; I talk with people at work and see their skeletons gently working apart, their bones nestling into the soil. There's nothing gruesome or terrible about it. But it makes it difficult to take the troubles of the workday or the discontents of the hearth all that seriously.

The days flicker by. I find myself looking more and more at the sky. Every time I go outside I have to contemplate it, puzzle over it. It has nothing to tell me, nothing that will pay the mortgage or fix the roof. But every day it sets the question over again: why, it asks, am I so heartrendingly beautiful? Until you understand that you don't understand anything.