Eternity’s children in riding of wind
In tunnels of long empty sky
In silences draped in the need to begin
In seconds as eons and eyes.
In quieter moments and quieter tears
And quieter places we doze.
In magical moments and voices we hear,
We learn just how much we don’t know.
COMET
Ronald James
Michael trudges the pasty path until the caged vastness of the silent meadow is there for him. Perhaps a time alone with the stars and the streaking of tonight’s particular sky will set him from the grayness of his pain. Maybe there is a chance that the color of life can be once again vivid and deep.
Let it be, if only for a fractal glimpse.
Such a brilliant blue they see from the infinite black.
A swift and swarming, invisible descending.
Breathe! Such a feeling to need air and the warmth of the sun.
Fly on borrowed wings. See from the eyes of a hundred fleshy lives and share as they are.
There is nowhere but now, and the truth of the moment dwells only in our mastery of its essence!
And the meadow becomes another thing.
He senses a current in the air, a spider on his spine, a warm chill. Then his attentions turn.
Don’t run too far, Jenny, it’ll be dark soon.! Love in his eyes for his daughter, watching on as she chases a butterfly -- reaching, laughing.
A scent of evening grass. A slipping sun purpling the sky. A gentle wind sanding leaves on distant tall trees.
The telescope stands on wire legs, and he begins to aim it to the Eastern sky, across the sweeping, murmuring field.
Jenny is at his side, a wide eyed gentleness with light and bouncing hair. She points along the imaginary path of the telescope's blind eye.
Is that where Heaven is?”
He laughs. “Yes, Honey. Heaven’s up there and all around us.”
Jenny knows he’s telling the truth.
He plays with the focus.
Jenny walks to a flower. A yellow flower with a black maw, the day’s last bees fluttering just above her.
Such a happy smell falling softly from the vivid petals. She is reminded of a dream. There was starlight and smiles and crickets calling. A rare purity in the universe, a child in eternity’s womb.
“Electric, I beckon. Slip me from my sudden stem and thirsty roots, from my untimely petals. Touch me as the flower. In you I can only wallow.”
“Jenny, are you all right?”
“I love it here. How much longer, Daddy?”
He looks at his watch, then to the horizon. “Soon, Sweetie, soon.”
Jenny can see them now. She has dreamed them before. No, something more. She bends down and touches a blade of grass. There is a sparkling as she runs her finger slowly up its tender stalk. She understands how it is to be blind and bound to the earth, how sunlight is food and there is a long time to dwell on the tickle of soil. Everything is shimmering. Basking in becoming. She smiles.
A first star opens its shine to the thickening night.
He leans to his cylindrical eye.
“They’re all children, you know.” She says.
He doesn’t seem to hear.
Not everyone can, she understands.
She is lighter now, like a feathery slipping thought on dreamshine wings, and she realizes why just as she becomes almost again real.
The night is complete, as the last shades of day fall off the edge of the earth. The faceless moon hangs low and full, and the backdrop of sky is speckled with glimmering and far away stones.
More of them are coming, like a cosmic wildfire they advance -- one but many.
“Oh, my.” He points. “There it is, Jenny! There it is!”:
The comet is larger than the stars, smaller than the moon, gleaming forth from the East, moving with ever such a slow grace -- ascending and blue. A tail like diamond dust, meek in its brilliance, like a humble queen or a quiet god.
Jenny is suddenly confused, torn between her selves.
They dance through all the life, tasting and being each and every thing that moves or grows or takes air. Like water washing on the sand, they mingle and soak.
Things are not quite right, but she isn’t fearful, only awash in a raining collage of memory and present tense.
The comet is brighter, closer.
“It’s amazing, isn’t it?” He whispers.
“It’s alive, you know,” She replies.
He laughs. “It’s made of vapor and ice, Honey. In space there is no heat, no air. It’s not alive, but it is very beautiful. One of the most beautiful things in the universe, next to you.”
She giggles. He likes to make her laugh, she remembers.
The meadow is a firesplash, even the trees are watching, fleetingly something more than they were born.
Jenny knows everything now, and there is a sadness, but it is a sadness mingled with a deep and definite knowledge of how it must be.
“You can’t see them, can you?”
“What Honey? Can’t see what?” He bends to look through the telescope.
“Don’t!” She yells. “Not yet.!” She almost grabs his arm but realizes it is too soon. Too soon to touch.
“But Jenny, the comet will be gone soon, I want to see it up close. It will be a thousand years before one so bright as this passes the Earth.”
“Just wait, Daddy. Please?” He must not see it yet.
“We are you, and you are us. Show him what you choose, choose for him what you will show.”
A squirrel pauses in the tall grass. An animal in a docile and watery state -- more than itself.
“Daddy, see the squirrel? It’s everything, Daddy.”
The comet is at its highest, the doorways at their most passable. They are all here now, currents strong. They taste and they see and hear. How quaint, the physical. How simply nostalgic and helplessly primal. How bound and blind love is in corporeal trappings.
“It’s just a squirrel, Honey.” He cocks his head. “Are you sure you’re all right, you’re acting strange.”
She smiles.
He turns the telescope to the path of the comet and bends again to look.
“No!” She runs to him, leaving no path through the grass, no sound from her steps. She leaps, grabbing at him. “I want you to understand first!”
He braces himself for his daughter’s desperate impact, but it never comes. He feels a tingle as she drifts through him, a gauzy breeze on some other wing.
Jenny slips to the earth and faces him -- tearstruck and misty, fearful and silent in the showing.
There is a complete and motionless silence, a second familiar to him, a slip of time as before, but carrying in itself much darker affirmation. It is then that he remembers so many flowers. So many flowers . . .
The comet seems to hover impossibly, it’s blue slate light bathing Jenny in a soft and passive glow. Such a radiance seems only too germane to the truth.
He cries as he knows what she is. His tears blur his vision of her, just as time and the continuing passage of life had already done, but in a vastly different way. The flowers come alive in his thoughts, bathing his heartache with a tender avalanche of spectrum and textured leaves.
He can feel the warmth of fleeting hands in his -- reliving friends-- the closeness of soft tight hugs. He can hear the whispers again as if they were happening in the meadow. So many people -- so many flowers.
“I’m so sorry . . . I wish there was something I could say . . I mean, what a waste . . terrible. . . I’m so sorry.”
“And she was so young.”
“If there’s anything I can do. Really.”
Of course, there wasn’t.
Those were tolerant moments, a time when he wanted to scream, but kept his pain to himself. Friends in their most useless guise, unable to bring back the dead or still the anger. The flowers, ironically seemed to know they were born to die and escort her away. It was at that exact time when he fell away from himself, from the world.
A time when he began to go through the motions, having lost the animation of the truly passionate chasers of life. A time when he began to stare at the stars, seek solace in the great black and infinite sky.
Stargazer -- in a dream there’s nothing out there anymore.
Brief seconds that seemed much more in his mind, swimming in fuzzy shadows of ghosted time. Then it is again now.
She is still there, cyan fires speckling the night air all around her.
He can’t understand what made him forget, what plunged him into impossibly being with her, how he could somehow become fused to the memory of his daughter and the night meadow sky. Could it be the final and ultimate finger of insanity caressing his mind?
She smiles, seemingly unsure if she should.
A kindness in the breeze.
“I love you, Daddy. I’m sorry you hurt.”
“I love you too.” He doesn’t know what else to say. To question such a benevolent illusion, to cast it in a draping of doubt, to deny its life when he so desperately wants it to be, seems wrong. It doesn’t make sense.
None of it makes sense.
Like a dusting, the night answers with a soft blizzard of shimmerings.
The comet seems frozen, not chasing the horizon. Time is dead, he muses. Maybe I am too.
Jenny is fifty feet tall just as sure she is at his side. A tree slips from its green and walks, cast in a gown of hazy white and her familiar face. She smiles at him from across the field, at the same time only feet away.
Two Jennies reach into the bristling air and touch the glimmer. A blade of grass grows Jenny and walks from its roots. They all do.
He knows now that there is much to understand, and he wonders if he can. Wonders if he will.
The night is alive with Jenny, a thousand, a million. The universe is only of her, and the ground itself is aglow in a basking of her smiles. Everything physical has become Jenny, infinite Jenny, endless and forever a shine. Jenny is the trees, the creatures on the ground and in the air. She makes the starlight. She is the starlight.
He breathes deep, a reassurance of his status among the living, the needful. There could be no place but heaven for such a thing to see. Jenny runs, she dances, she spins in amongst herself, she is so many.
She says nothing but says so much. He finds himself in a curious bliss, not sure if he’s having a dream, a death or a demon tease. He has heard of oneness. Perhaps, just perhaps, now he has also seen it.
Far away, the farthest Jenny rises. She blows him a kiss and he can sense her in a giggle. Then she is gone. A tree once again paints the distance, and throws to the canopy of space a single spark.
If raining heaven became the land, it was only for a short time, for as the first ghost of Jenny returns the tree to itself and rises to the comet train, the others do as well. Like cosmic dominoes, they all fall back to the high. In the strangest of waves, the grass washes away the sparkling and becomes again its green and thirsty purpose.
She shrinks into a squirrel. Probably the same one. He hears her again.
“It’s everything, you know.” More sparks. Sparks of her.
Firefly Jennies return to the black, to the vapor and ice. The bluing is brilliant as the starlight’s children mount the wings of their nebulous bird.
Once again, the meadow is the meadow. Just a quiet place where the sky is at its clear and the rain leaves nothing to die.
The comet is a fireshine of color, again moving swiftly across the sky. He is aware now that he has discovered the nature of profound truth.
Not discovered. Been shown.
There is one of her left, the one still sitting in the grass, tears gone, glow still warm.
“I have to go now,” she says.
“I know.” There is no pain with that. If anything, the shadows of an envy. Just shadows, though. Why crave what you ultimately receive?
The comet is falling. Time is short. Time again.
“You understand, now, don’t you Daddy?”
“I’m sure I will.” He does not hate the tear that warms and salts his face.
She’s gone now, a fleeting burst of tiny light.
The telescope!
He is not surprised when the comet has a face. Hers, of course. That strikes him as conceivably odd, but not really. He is not the same person he was under the sunset.
He smiles to himself as the comet shrinks way.
“Goodbye.” He whispers.
He was a man immersed in the drowning black water of loss, then he was standing in the middle of everything and forever. Now he is somewhere in-between. How perfectly and divinely ironic that he should bury himself in watching the stars, running from the hurt in a quiet, distracting thing. A toil. The irony of course, in his being set free by the very sky he turned to for reasons unclear.
The truth will do that.
The days are better now, not perfect, not completely without some sense of mourning. But better. He smiles when he wakes each day, realizing somehow that he must go through many more sunsets before he can ever fly the windsails of space and time.
He fights the nagging doubt, which seems inevitable and increasingly more justifiable. Think about it, he tells himself. Did it really happen? Then again, define real. Is real only in what we perceive? If I hadn’t been alone, would others have seen? He finds himself in the same questioning the souls of men had been submerged in for all of time.
Was I given an answer? So unsure. The nature, possibly, of our whole journey.
Jenny’s face is fading into a confusing shadowbox of what ifs, whys and the physical need for something to touch. A souvenir of heaven. A ticket stub.
Please don’t let me come full circle. Why can’t I just believe?
He is in-between.
He stops for coffee and a paper. The clerk smiles at him, takes his money. Its a daily thing. So many rituals.
Michael. “How are you?”
A familiar voice. Peter, a friend.
He sets down his cup and shakes the man’s hand. “I’m fine. Good to see you.”
“Michael, I’m sorry about Jenny. I was in New York, I felt really bad about not making the funeral.”
He feels the funeral again. So many flowers. No. Don’t feel this. He looks at his friend. “Don’t worry about it, Peter. Thanks for the thought. I’m doing okay, really.”
“I’m glad. We’ll have to do something this weekend. I’ll give you a call.” Peter bends and takes a tabloid from the wire rack.
Michael laughs. “You don’t actually read that stuff, do you?”
Peter grins. “This garbage is entertaining as hell. It amazes what people will actually believe.” He holds up the paper. “I mean, heck, look at the cover. “Thousands See Faces Of Loved Ones In Passing Comet.” Jeez. Can you believe that?”
Short silence, words lost. He shakes his head. “I guess you never know.”
Almost never.