Vistas
All the time, things are happening. It is hard to record them in such a way as sitting by the passenger window in our minds and watching them, the things, flit by.
In Puerto Rico we stopped on the top of a hill in Maricao and it was a green, lush place that we could see, it did not end. From the top of the tower we watched homes and palms dig into the cliff side, their teeth strong and hungry. The still frame, this moment of our watching, did not let us see the many lives and feelings that daily bled their way across the landscape. We said, the air up here is cool and fresh. It was.
Six weeks before I flew in a plane out of New Orleans and thought about my mother. Bayou spread beneath in watery veins. Green earth sang in small islands there and there. Then clouds moved in, and still could I see through their gentle whiteness. I said, this is what it must be to be in the arms of God.
The day before we boiled crayfish live and broke apart their bodies with our hands. They had soft, cartoon eyes that could not see, amassed and dead as they were.
And then some weeks later we bought a terrarium from an old woman. The woman who sold the terrarium had gray hair and thin hands. She told us this, the making of terrariums, was a thing she did often. A god she had become through hewing worlds. I pictured her home. Glass walls and piles of stones. A kitchen rife with living things. At night, her refrigerator moans—the resting place of so much on the verge of decay.
But there is likely no God and so I must settle for his name and an aircraft. A feeling and a view.
Driving along the coast in Puerto Rico we see the ocean mawing at the land. It is a most beautiful thing to see. I plug the image into the constellation I am living.
We hop from node to node of importance and in-between we see the view below. Oh world, how green or yellow or brown you have made yourself. Oh feeling, that I might place you upon the world and say, you are the skin of my mother and you now, her bones.
I flew in an airplane into the hands of God and asked of God, what things you have made, tell me. He did not reply because he is not real or because there is no God or because a life is a life either way.
The greenness of the world signifies its continual decline and growth. When we, as humans die our skin becomes blue and mottled. Perhaps we are saying, hello sky. Perhaps it is nothing more than blue, we and our blood returning to the air, the water, the place we have always known as home.
