Coming Home

COMING HOME She was an airport on the flats by the river, her signage, lights and markings outlining corridors that couldn’t be seen in the sunlight of day A black silhouette from a full harvest moon, he landed in her life full of reverse engine roar, his flaps all extended, his sturdy landing gear bearing the flight-battered tonnage of turbulence and wind shear, super-heated metal and lonely encounters at forty-thousand feet at minus fifty degrees Searching his eyes for an accurate report on the stormy conditions permeating his soul, she stepped silently into his space! “So tell me!” she said in her soft smoky voice between sympathy and demand and he responded to her with a ridiculous riddle in a perfect haiku: “An idiot says: Soft stools come from warm wet wood, owls from big dark trees!” Slowly she smiled and stood silent and still Eventually she said “So surely there’s more?” read the sad resignation in his subsequent words: “To be a good martyr, one must live to be killed, become an exclamation point in a righteous discussion of holy dimensions! Bad is the martyr whose decision to die requires others to join her without their permission! Better is the person who chooses to live, to be sunlight and soil in the gardens of colors and soft evening rain through the leaves of the trees, making peace with each day and finding the sacred in all that there is!” Putting a red fingernail at the corner of his mouth she said “Fire is a lesson that is envied by water and favored by air, though invisibly so, and knowing that, Honey, make your presence a chalice that is burning and ringing wherever you are and let nobody’s arrogance make your world small, and may nobody’s ignorance lead to their fall!” Her words in his heart were like a laser of light through a transparent soul, his transcendent spirit somehow solid as a boulder from the rumbling rapids of the river nearby Finally he breathed, and touching her face with a reddish-brown hand with a double wedding band, he said “In my travels I’ve learned that the structure of granite is powerful proof that patience and pain are the essence of stone and of the people of misery that live in our midst; that the essence of prayer is a one-way discussion between an immutable presence and the politics of fear in the capricious and saturnine human condition, an impossible mechanism for divine intervention, eternal deliverance or temporary gain, but I am a fortunate man, and in this tragically anomalous moment of peace, let us walk in the woods where the moon leads the way through the silver-white clearings and the song of the wolf rides the cool evening breeze, where you are with me and the owl always near, always waiting and watching in wisdom and silence.” Emanuel Carter