Saturday, December 14, 2013

Still


The fullness of life can become either banal busyness or on better days something more like the marginally bearable heaviness of being. The choice is often triage. In a moment of stolen calm we can bend our necks and moan inwardly or look proverbially upward and sigh with gratitude. The decision seems minor at first because worry and prayer begin from the same place. But they are not the same: worry makes an immediate U-turn at the ribcage and festers ingrown while prayer rises off the soul like sweat from a horse’s flanks.

When Mr. Dale Wallace took the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ from his translucent thimble he threw it down the hatch with his chin to the ceiling and his eyelids shut in rustic ecstasy. Like he’d just busted through swinging saloon doors and slammed a gloved palm on the bar and growled for bourbon. His eyes wet with some unknown passion and his throat straight at the sky longing for more, it was clear to the other patrons that one should not come between this cowboy and his elements. The world itself waited as crushed grape blood clotted on the flailed wheat flesh in his teeth.

It still waits.