Pantherwife No. 5

This, then, my loves my lo-ammi, is the question: how shall I communicate to you what I have so often failed to communicate before, this duality that surprises afresh one accustomed to, composed of, at a loss without dualities; a duality wherein I rejoice at the weather and worry at its meaning, and see in this a metaphor for my own growing awareness of my happiness and the world’s sorrow, trying now to balance not my obsession with my own pain and my awareness of the world’s pain, but a deep well of contentment that seems somehow inappropriate when the wounds of creation bleed so black--see, it is like this: the prophet feels a strong urge to cry joy from the rooftops but sees a city of lies below her feet and hesitates, aware of the inappropriateness of her planned remarks; and the Marigold Woman and the Moonbuggy sit across from each other like duellists, having exchanged their weapons so that now the Marigold Woman brandishes the reality of sorrow while the Moonbuggy presents the subjective experience of fair prospects; and the writer hardly knows what to do with herself any more but waits with all these boys and girls for the prophet to come down from the rooftop and say something, anything--the great secret of the writer being that she cannot tell stories without the prophet, and the great secret of the prophet that she can only bray ungainly revelations without adornment, unless she lets the writer fold them into the dough she is kneading with her ink-stained and callused fingers--but I have wandered afield of my meaning and am telling you about these interdependencies that explain nothing of what I mean, that once again fail to express how like a tree split into two trunks my world is, how hate beats at the outside of my skull and joy beats at the inside, how heaven seems very far off and I struggle morning by morning to understand how I am to conduct myself when good and bad, joy and sorrow, hate and love, prospects and dooms are so terribly intermixed and cannot easily be separated, measured, adjudged, and organized into a coherent worldview, plan of action, set of temperament, and table of rules to simplify my life and reduce the uneasiness and guilt and uncertainty that so often plagues me and pulls me in two different directions until I feel again that pain that is at once unwelcome and the hot core of who I am and have always been and perhaps will always be?

Then again, maybe I don’t need to tell you. Maybe these expostulations are simply a novice’s attempt to express what we all know already. Maybe I should sit a spell with the abbas and the vulture and make my ropes in reverent silence.

Maybe I am waiting for the Day of the Lord, and it will all make sense then.