tending

“I know what I have given you. I do not know what you have received.”
—Antonio Porchia

I love when Easter Sunday falls on April 1st. The gothic drama
tells on itself as a comedy of betrayal—a necessary sin—
and love—claimed through suffering—a compulsory virtue.

Now imagine the power of conformity in this way, a consistency
and an understanding. Knowledge becomes a place of felt sense.
For some of us, it was this specific fear that kept us alive.

Peddlers of divinity will want to exclude the nonbelievers. To declare
the bounds of tenderness through touch, but every seven seconds
the ocean’s waves reset. A closed circuit continuously reborn.

Pleasure is straddled inside transience. At this rhythmic shoreline,
a future is eternal. More mirror than veil, I watch my reactions.
Instant memories now forgone by conclusion. A state of divergence.

I unravel my hands still held in the shape of prayer. I remember
how the tides, in their permanence, are measured by their separation
and absence—in crescendo and interpretation of return.