Shiva

There are houses we think we will live in forever, then suddenly these are not our houses. There are summers we believe will be one in a long endless daisy chain of summers, but the chain breaks in the hand--fragile all along, though it looked strong. You must be the pillar at the center of chaos, even when the psychic ether rips apart and the person you knew from aeons ago, from centuries, falls through. It is a cycle: birth and destruction, the lamb born in freezing rain and sleet on the cusp between a season of cold and a season of brightness, the tyger who springs forward like a scream made from shadow and fire.

"You're back," I say. I knew where you were all along, but I could not find you.
"You were here all along," you say. You thought maybe the cogs would not mesh this time around. Disappointed, you had said, "What's another twelve centuries? I'm patient." Then you saw the rivers in my open hands. When we talk, our words tumble over both our voices. Hard to hold back everything we haven't been able to say for a thousand years. There's a lot of catching up to do, and meanwhile the moon "turns in its clockwork dream" still.

Why are you here, now? So many riddles, so many untranslatable sutras whispering in the imagination, songs of small gods in the chambered nautilus of the outer dark, a shell that pours forth dreams in wild and fragmentary spillage.

The world will collapse time and space to bring these two together, when the time is right. So write. The Book of Life is falling open to the proper page. Trust in the process. It is written in letters you once thought were barbed wire, but whose true meaning is the heart of peace.