Comfort Squash

The mask is off the sun and that hot damp breath summertime is full of wickedness and germs. Dainty powdery white moths sew caterpillar seeds all over tomato plants hairy as spider legs. Tiny tinny metallic beetles have snipped the tassels off corn like old men plucking hair from their ears. So they can hear. The raspy phlegm crackling off powerlines. The pop pop pop of someone’s hair triggered insecurity across the countryside. The silent stuffiness hooked like fish on a trotline of trees. Clouds look like milk poured in water. Milk looks like clouds squeezed into stainless steel. The grass is dying. Trees are thriving. 

It takes over eight minutes for the sun to close the distance between us. That breakneck pace, that lonely brimming emptiness, for eight whole minutes, like a bullet from a gun in a vacuum with nothing like air to impede it. Strikes skin and stops still hot. A planetary tanning bed basked in the affordable glow off nuclear fusion. 

Earth. Where infinity finally meets its Zucchini.

What is not God?

Once you have learned the entire story of a mountain spring,
you will know the story of very many creeks. And in knowing creeks,
you will come to meet several rivers. And after following rivers,
you will touch oceans.

You will come to know God through learning yourself. Your source.
Studying your needs and limitations, your unique capabilities and strengths.

You are not an island.
You do not survive in isolation.

By the time you have pieced together the entirety of the story of you,
you will have come to know a whole planet. And the way earth
is held in the hands of the sun, so is our sun gripped
by a singularity at the center of our galaxy,
rolled in the palm of an even greater singularity
that off centers our universe,
emitting gravity the way stars put off light.
Crossing infinity to hold us tight.

Because this God has an everlasting affinity toward life.

The way an astronaut looks at earth through a window.

They want me to write, words like wind to a kite. Words like stars above night. Like lenses. And how the entire atmosphere is one. A planet rolls like eyes from just how much we can not. Not even thinking how we’re sticking out sideways until eyes stray earthly boundaries and look back at us like we were just a neighbor or something. Home. And across the street from home. Are an infinite apart. It would take the geniusest of us to begin imagining where to start to get back over there without leaving here behind for good. The whole rest of the neighborhood. All of our property values tethered like the cords that hold astronauts. The air they breath has gone further than we ever will be, and fed the minds and bodies of far better women and men than you or I. I want them to fly. And they want me to write. And we all need one another the way ships need anchors, the way we use each other like mirrors. Seeing a little bit of ourselves in someone else may be the only way to see it. We can tell people ten thousand times the earth is round and flying but we will not feel it until we see looking back at ourselves like we were across the street from our own home planet. Then we will fall in love with it. The way astronomers stare at stars through lenses. The way an astronaut looks at earth through a window.