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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
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