Sometimes it comes plastered to the sidewalk, a five-pointed thing, thin as paper, red at the rim with veins the color of spring. Now flattened, muddied, swept into its resting place by the swift orbit of gravity, pushed a few inches by wind, tethered to concrete then perhaps to the street or the drain or the bottom of a boot.
I fall to my knees at the sight of it, the five-pointed thing. Not in that moment, but later, in my imagination, when I become a supplicant made holy in the randomness of all that is careless and chaotic, made holy by the act itself of imagining the bruised and fallen as sacred, as story, as me.
…I become a supplicant made holy in the randomness of all
that is careless and chaotic…
And I think of you, too, this day, my father, during this season of golden twilights that lifted you into star stuff, into distant atoms uncomplicated by seasons, far from the falling of leaves, and yet here in the presence of them.
(on the anniversary of Daddy’s passing)