Noni's Field

When I closed my eyes in Noni’s field
We were lying on our backs.
I dreamt that the ground split a seam,
Our spirits, floating.
When no longer tied into our bodies,
We left them (wrapping)
As a sign, to slip into the crack.
Tired and ready to go.

But I don’t know what goes on.
I touched my grandfather’s face,
He lay fixed in his casket.

He lay sewn shut and folded
So that none could refuse it.

They had posed, they had painted him.
I laughed. I let him go.
His cheeks washed like watercolor sunlight, evening time.
I could never put my hands back to them.

Still, I don’t know what goes on.
Will my thoughts burn in unseen patterns?
Form a dim glow in your mind,
Long after you remember who it was that I looked like?
We saw the sky, swarming full with the light that the fireflies made.
An accidental constellation.

You, how will you go?
Out through your mouth in a sigh?
Into a space we don’t know.

- Anathallo, "Noni's Field"

Sometimes others communicate just what you want to say but never knew how. People like T. S. Eliot, Sufjan Stevens, C. S. Lewis, and Anathallo do that for me. To read or listen to some of their words is to come almost so near to my heart as to touch it. This song makes my heart ache and feel free at the same time: I hate the reality of it, that is to say, the reality of death, but I breathe easier with the knowledge that what I feel has been felt before, and what ails me is a pain as old as Eden itself.