Apocalypse

Sometimes it’s not the wind in the trees or the quiet babble of a brook

Sometimes it’s the train whistle and the faint trembling of the ground,
or the way the road ribbons like a whitetail bounding down the slopes

It could be water: the drops spilling from leaves after rainfall—and the sense that everything is waiting and in-between

It could be the blue light of a television at night that stills me—lives searching through that signal for some answer
Lives in search, everywhere, for relief

Or it might be the spray of light cast upward on a sprig of tree, the copper buzzing as it hums, and then a machine turns on across the street—an air conditioner condenses—and the world rattles metallic, droning, but quieter than the crickets that swell like oceans

In the wake of such things,
I become the divination rod
I spark to life with some knowledge of water
And I turn, almost startled, as if an apparition will appear—

An ordination coming. An unveiling.

This sense of a consummation to come—a fire;
a flame on an altar that resurrects as surely as it kills,
and the altar inside us,
as we genuflect towards the light

Though our breath catches as before a mystery
Though our breath catches and can’t seem to find itself
The world, as a lover, never impatient, reveals things even more slowly than the seasons

And yet the world is already, if we look closely, naked and revealed
The world already a bride waiting for what she longs for