99

Then indeed are we . . . a peculiar people. A gecko walks across the back of a shoji screen, looking like the afterlife of itself. Families excoriate or forgive; the bomber expresses remorse. Our narratives are clean, even where they angle off and drop like half-built bridges. Look close enough at the calligraphy of fern on your palm and you can harm no one. It's the ordinary that absolves us. Yourself excludes only what it cannot see through. What distinguishes us from him is the dropping of the “y” before “our.” We look for signs, but that's a language covered by spider webs and flies. There's no reader and nothing to be read, only soul's mystery, his and ours. The soul sends out its politics in thin and sticky lines, forgiving its victims before it eats.

--24 June 2015