The Last Hour

Lean and sane in the last hour of a long fast or fiercer discipline he could touch dust into a sudden surge of limbs and speak leaves in the night air above him, inhabit quiet so wholly he heard roots inch into the unfeeling earth, rings increasing inside of that tree. Without moving, hardly breathing, he could call out of the long darkness walls around him, a house whose each room he knew, its hoard of silences, solitudes, doors opening onto the wide fields through which he moved, breathing deeply, unbewildered by the dead with their hands of wind, their faces of cloud. Stilled and gifted in the last hour before the first light, in the dark place of his own making, he could feel rocks relax alive beside him, gather from a moon-raveled river the pearl curves and blue fluency of a girl his hands once knew. He could let her go. He let it all go, desire and grief and raw need going out of him moment by moment into the mild immaculate night, love by love into a last passion of pure attention, nerves, readiness... Light carved out of the darkness a muscled trunk, each clenched limb and the difficult tips of a plain mesquite taking shape over the hard ground where they found him, his eyes wide and his whole body hungering upward, as if he could hear and bear the bird singing unseen deep in those leaves.