Dead Fake Creeks and Flashing Christmas Lights

hours
in the three season's room –
the fourth season
hurts all day

It stays with you, the way ice cuts, the way bones refuse to go numb. I beg to be forgiven so the forgiver may also be forgiven. Sometimes this walk is so cold. Sometimes my fingers are frozen.

Coffee, a hot fireplace, the urge to fall asleep for the rest of December. I watch the mallards break thin ice along the shoreline. He said he wanted to see my face when I look at a lake. Who holds me. Who needs to. Who cannot find a way. How cold the long walk from the water.

I would make soup but I am too lost. The kids complain about “no traditions” and thusly listen to Christmas songs and decorate cookies. “Make my wish come true, all I want for Christmas is you.”

When you mentioned the elk or the deer, I thought of the centering prayers sessions with the Quaker. He used the imagery of a deer tip-toeing to the edge of an open meadow. Tears would stream down my face and everyone thought I was spiritual. But I wasn't; I was alive with the forest once but now, I am the destroyer.

In most ways, full in you. In others, hanging on by a thread. The dreck of me is killing us.

How he handles the details. How I disappear from the details. How God says, “Let me have it.”

No diamond sparkles through the branches. No blue rescues from not-so-distant madness. Now there is only dead fake creeks and incessantly flashing Christmas lights breaking up the ways in which night needs to be dark.

Without flow, Beloved, the world becomes so very, very quiet.