It is like an hour. Any hour. This one. Something happens, much does not. Or as always, everything happens: the standing walls keep standing with their whole attention. A noisy crow call lowers and lifts its branch, the crow scent enters the leaves, enters the bark, like stirred-in honey gone into the tea. How rarely I have stopped to thank the steady effort of the world to stay the world. To thank the furnish of green and abandon of yellow. The ancient Sumerians called the beloved “Honey,” as we do. Said also, “Borrowed bread is not returned.” Like them, we pay love’s tax to bees, we go on arranging the old notes in different orders. Desire inside A C A G G A T. Forgiveness in G T A C T T. In a world of space and time, arrangement matters. An hour has no front or back, except to those whose eyes face forward, whose tears blur thought and stars. Five genes, in a certain arrangement, will spend this life unrooted, grazing. It has to do with how the animal body comes into being, the same whether ant or camel.
