Whose face it was I saw today, white vapors collected amid clearest blue, skyward atop crashing sea? Was it delirium of sunlight allowed the fleeting visage in that overhead expanse? Tender face filled with pain but calling, no, not crying, and was it to me alone, or others, likewise pleasuring in the autumnal generosity like a summer day? I could see you, but could not hear your call above thundering waves, so high and white, magnificent, delivering surfers and their boards to all the seagulls and plovers to whom the sands have been returned for these many days and weeks and months to come – nor do I know your face. Can there be, already and so soon, so many friends, I need to look to faces in the skies for they are vanished from the places we so loved and only I still walk upon?
Years, decades, last century, a small child by her bicycle in a deserted alleyway, bleeding from a tarnished fender and discarded glass among the stones and brambles and the broken asphalt, the urban garden, watched vapors gather into a beatific vision, so filled was her little mind and heart and sense of candlelight and choirs and the scent of sacred incense. She stood shaking in the wintry wind defying expectations until darkness, encroaching, goaded her to, disappointed, cycle home breathing earthly air and living still.
More near, upon the blackness of a distant shore at the edge of western history, she spied another face within the mottled skies and heard the songs of that peacock sea brimming then with promise that if she closed her eyes and studied not the skies or surf or volcanic stones spinning urgently beneath her, but the swell of her own heart and mind, the sounds of her children playing, she could find justice, a companion and a guide, like the shifting vapors, fleeting to discern, and yet essential.
Fanatic Hearts 