Jagged with Love

We Take the Sky

8~ we TaKe THe SKY We take the sky, as ifred is somethingwe could own, somethingwe might find in the stillest moments, as ifthe earth is humane and wouldn't break our bones. (None of His were broken. Not one, allegedly.) Red is in the land too, is in the way we look at each other, the hardness of our sleep, the need to fall down, to tell of the pox that sweptAunt Jess, the drink that ushers Father, the path that never leads to wealth or rest or health-but the one we always take. Shalom, we say. Buena suerte. We always take the sky, fold it over ourselves, the soil, run it across our skin and cling to it, savoringthe tart ofa lemon, palming a bar ofsoap even when our hands are clean, naming the insects that fly across the white bulb of moon late at night, rakishly loving the one who knows our smell, saying (as if they are not questions), Isn't this how we st~ alive and Why shouldn't I burrow here. This is how we drum on, cold and ungrowingwhat more to be than alive? It all hums: so we die in small bits, so the egg-shaped hollow that sits behind our stomachs, so He died and rose again on the third day, so (what). We take the sky, we scatter on the land. We fall down, grab the everythings, the tiniest cures, fall down again, wash ourselves in red and know, unwittingly, it is not enough. More certain than anything: it will never be, and then here, in the stillest moments, the story rushes again (veil splitting, stone rolling, Mary, Peter, John, running, linen and spices like a limp cocoon, the blur of angels, the one red splash ofa second-like a rose breaking open-when we know), and somewhere inside us a small green seed pricks the dirt, coiling for air. He soothes and stirs, nngertip-sized holes in His hands, roaming the soil and the sky for our broken bones. And the shaking on earth is our brand new lives: Alleluia, we say, feeling even the empty oval of our stomachs rise. 83 ...