The nail has split vertically and won’t heal. It snags on my pocket.
Age causes this. The nail must henceforth be repaired by a manicurist.
The word henceforth shows my age. The nail is evidence that I’m
hopelessly woven into the eternal fabric. Another is my sprained
rotator cuff. On a broader scale, you could include PTSD, impressive
in its desire to replicate fear and misery. The weaving is called
karma—one action triggers another, but appears from so deep it is like
a hand rising from a bottomless pool, brandishing a sword. The rising
and falling always seem original, no matter how many times. The dolphin
is woven into the sea, then into the sky, blowing one out of the other,
just to maintain. There is a photo of me in pigtails, swinging on the catalpa
tree in the backyard. I remember her. She rose out of somewhere
the way a bottle washes up from a thousand miles offshore and will be
pulled away in the next tide. Dreams are the real thing, I know this
because of the havoc they wreak, because of the word wreak, which flings
real objects at other objects until someone’s dead. Then we’re back
where we started, and yet we keep on. A sermon on this makes no
difference. The mind is a sky with clouds woven from nothing, dissolving
as we watch. Persephone got dragged down what I envision
as a deep crack in the earth, narrower and narrower, but then
opening into a room with a bed that would have remained undisturbed
but for the light up there in memory, gradually making itself visible,
because everything up there was dreaming of being made whole.