Stuart Kestenbaum

The light snow started late last night and continued all night long while I slept and could hear it occasionally enter my sleep, where I dreamed my brother was alive again and possessing the beauty of youth, aware that he would be leaving again shortly and that is the lesson of the snow falling and of the seeds of death that are in everything that is born: we are here for a moment of a story that is longer than all of us and few of us remember, the wind is blowing out of someplace we don’t know, and each moment contains rhythms within rhythms, and if you discover some old piece of your own writing, or an old photograph, you may not remember that it was you and even if it was once you, it’s not you now, not this moment that the synapses fire and your hands move to cover your face in a gesture of grief and remembrance.

What was it we wanted to say anyhow, like today when there were all the letters in my alphabet soup and suddenly the ‘j’ rises to the surface. The ‘j’, a letter that might be great for Scrabble, but not really used for much else, unless we need to jump for joy, and then all of a sudden it’s there and ready to help us soar and to open up our hearts at the same time, this simple line with a curved bottom, an upside down cane that helps us walk in a new way into this forest of language, where all the letters are beginning to speak, finding each other in just the right combination to be understood.