As a fan’s notes for grace, and quavery chant against the dark, I sing a song of things that make us grin and bow, that just for an instant let us see sometimes the web and weave of merciful, the endless possible, the incomprehensible inexhaustible inexplicable yes.
Such as, to name a few:
The way the sun crawls over the rim of the world every morning like a child’s face rising beaming from a pool all fresh from the womb of the dark, and the way jays hop and damselflies do that geometric aeroamazing thing and bees inspect and birds probe and swifts chitter.
And the way the young mother at the bus-stop has her infant swaddled and huddled against her chest like a blinking extra heart, and the way a very large woman wears the tiniest miniskirt with a careless airy pride that makes me so happy I can hardly squeak.
And the way seals peer at me owlishly from the surf like rubbery grandfathers, and the way cormorants in the ocean never ever get caught by onrushing waves but disappear casually at the last possible second so you see their headlong black stories written on the wet walls of the sea like moist petroglyphs.
And the way no pavement asphalt macadam concrete cement thing can ultimately defeat a tiny relentless green thing.
And the way people sometimes lean eagerly face-first into the future, and the way infants finally discover to their absolute agogishment that those fists swooping by like tiny fleshy comets are theirs!
And the way when my mom gets caught unawares by a joke she barks with laughter so infectious that people grin two towns over, and the way one of my sons sleeps every night with his right leg hanging over the side of his bed like an oar no matter how many times I fold him back into the boat of the bed.
And the way the refrigerator hums to itself in two different keys, and the way the new puppy noses through hayfields like a headlong exuberant hairy tractor.
And the way my daughter always makes one immense final cookie the size of a door when she makes cookies, and the way one son hasn’t had a haircut since Napoleon was emperor.
And the way crows arrange themselves sometimes on the fence like the notes of a song I don’t know yet, and the way car