Yinsanity
in the Turning Year
Upriver, past watertrace, beyond
the iron steppes of time and their buffetings, the images of our past continue
and wait for us. The images are everything we can imagine while our ankles
sink in the dirt of necessity -- and now our shinbones. How long will the
images wait? For you, just long enough, if you've found the thread that
will lead you home. It's needled through your heart, though most don't feel
it at first, not until it leads them backward to the doctors and their machines,
the experts who find what they look for but not the thread, because the
thread is invisible. It traces your footsteps, father and daughter, mother
and son, one a knife, the other a seed, each planted just deep enough in
the dirt of necessity to grow beyond need. If this sounds like nonsense,
ignore it. The sea shrugs its shoulders every day. What does it care that
today you button down your life and begin your journey? The weight of the
sea compresses our fates, constricts us to our blood with its tiny cathedrals,
each filled with the musical breath of God. Down river, at the mountain
of seven caves that is your body, silt deposits its mineral memories. December
and its smoke say goodbye, see you next year after Whatever Will Come, after
days like rivers that sink suddenly into space, cascading into What's Left,
goodbye -- and you begin again. What waits for you this year? At the river's
edge of the heart, prophets whisper. Where do you think you're going? Like
spray from a waterfall, some of us rise while others fall. We enter when
we leave. Together, we drift through the antilife full of the East Wind,
inspired by the left side of our blood, dressed in windskins of dawn --
together, we float up from the tarpit of dreams as what we really are: vapors,
the secret lives of the mineral earth. Our past and its chapters are ash.
Only the images continue, far upriver, past watertrace. If we can see that,
we stand on cleared ground. The heart has many concerns. This is the deepest.
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