Adam Clay

Perhaps is a new and sudden way of being. Like satisfaction not yet begun or some other kind of kindness: a more gentle one? Night makes us all into the middle of something until we aren't anything anymore. The sky isn't any color here. It's OK because consolation is color enough for your cheeks, wind bitten and glorified by the light of the wine in this glass draining toward a better time, a better space. I invented a notion of hell, and you invented a notion of hello. Amazing similarities and bizarrely coincidental snow Like a twig falling from an oak's tallest point, I keep wondering when forgiveness found its way into this world in a time before bargaining and beckoning. It's quiet again and now the sky is a tangled mess of rags seeking out the bored and unwilling. I'd like to make a map not of the land but of the path I took to arrive in this place, a map with no idealized purpose, a map of a thousand airless pines.

What might all songs lean into? You scramble eggs one moment, and in the next minute you're eating them with dry toast and black coffee in silence. On a day like any day, your voice is not your own: the grass clippings disrupt a robin too large to fly from worm to worm. We don't know why we speak, but yet our voices persist, even when void of substance— like a dream you'd like to recall throughout the day, but you don't or you can't and after a week, it's gone forever. Of course our voices evolve years before our bodies— our vocal cords vibrate like a heartbeat, senselessly. No explanation needed. Eventually all languages converge. Each thought falls into all others. And what thought resists being built by words? Perhaps fear placed us here in this room together: a fear of fire at one point turned into a fear of God. After that, a fear of godlessness, a room where a word before another word and another word after the first was all we had, all we could imagine. Somehow an image means more than the object itself but not because it's made of words. Most likely it's because the act of creation sets the mind down like a bird in a field where the speed of the invasive cannot exist.

If an idea exists but is never found, then the stained-glass windows will reflect nothing back to the ear. Most days filter through the mind, waiting not for movement but for a road to be built, brick by brick, word by word, weariness replaced with joy, but what is joy without the years and the way they open constantly, two or three hearts pumping a volume of blood meant for just one? Our disbelief in the ordinary emerges from the way we color routine: leaves pile up depending on the wind, but why pause to notice? Eventually the seasons embrace what our words will not, the illuminated day just one of a thousand others, and the names we give back to the world mean ultimately little against the way the sun pleads sense from the smallest cradle of dew.