It’s not, despite the things that you’ve been told, those desiccated pages, poked about by men in robes with glasses balanced on the ends of their noses. It’s not whatever they find out, going at it with their scalpels and needle-tipped tweezers. Those exhausting ancient-sounding explications that make your heart wither and fold in on itself like a cowering child.
It’s clear the life has left whatever they have left there on the table. And that’s the way of it: Life flees the words just as soon as you try to make a law out of them, build a wall out of them, construct with your parsing of paragraphs a set of steps in the dark for someone you forgot to love to fall upon.
Those books like stones that you pick up, intending to hurl, reduced to paper coffins for dead words.
So put that scripture back upon the shelf and come away with me to the field of purple flowers which sprung up overnight. Come away with me to where the sky has turned all pink and purple with a sunset embracing ludicrous white clouds. Point and laugh at them, floating along like bears and castles and mountain ranges and funny men holding little cigars.
Come with me exactly as you are. Let what’s left of the sun come pouring down on you, inescapable even when you close your eyes.
And, there in the red palace of your interior soul,
beneath the stars that dance in bloods vessels and capillaries,
find the voice you didn’t know you had
speaking words as old and true as the rock,
which used to be a mountain,
which rests now beneath the flow of the river that carved it,
which calls you by your own name
which in all that searching through dead volumes, dying words
you find that, after all, you’d never heard.
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