Mine eyes have seen the glory . . .
The wind curled under my hair as I biked, sought and gained purchase at the nape of my neck.
. . . of the coming of the Lord . . .
Over the crest of a hill I stopped because there, there was the sky, dear God, the sky. A skein of light hung near the horizon where the clouds broke, loomed threads taut and spreading, fanning out, threads of light. From that contracted place the sky overblew itself, not an explosion exactly, or perhaps like an explosion at a great distance so that it seems still. How is that? But that kind of still. Only a perceived stillness which up close is a terrible violence. The blue was almost audible, like the screaming of a jet, with the knit quilt of gray clouds unravelling, or pulling like raw cotton or as if the quilt were unfinished, stuffing spilling out the edges, showing purest white like snow, like the first of anything, like the gap between impact and pain. And the sky happened in my chest. And I caught the sky in fragments of sobs as its planted seed burst forth, grew its whole life, and left me to dissipate. I breathed that very screaming thread and sound sky, and Knew what the day needed me to know.
Perhaps I have been sleeping.
