Canticles Floating Closer

At 5 a.m., I cook the dog's food in the dark, make coffee, and all the while think about other animals I could be caring for at this pitchy hour . . . but am not. While she is eating I slip outside, leaving the door open for her to come out when she is finished eating. The first birdsong will arrive in moments but for now, only tympanic drops of leftover rain tune themselves on mysterious surfaces.

A break between storms. Flood warnings. Why is always glut or drought? Well, it isn't, is it; it just seems that way when eyes have a certain way of looking.

A spider canvases a stack of notebooks next to The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, all piled neatly on the corduroy ottoman. I sit on the floor hosting dawn a lot these days. Before the songs of prayer is the delight of far off feathered canticles floating closer and closer.

Mortification of the body means one thing but looks like another. People notice and I try not to respond with “fuck off.” Obviously I am super enlightened now.

There is a level of honesty I don't know how to resurrect. Maybe that comes from a lifetime of living the wrong life – being the wrong woman – selling out. My confessor grows weary but prays on my behalf. Is my tribe always 1,000 miles away?

Ylang ylang oil for the diffuser. Thunder rolling in hard. Rain hissing from the west. These dark days, blacker than night; these perfumed pleas on my tongue.