Pt 2: Atrocities (a not so lucid reaction to school shootings)

And I call to mankind, Be not curious about God
For I who am curious about each am not curious about God,
No array of terms can say how much I am at peace about God and about death.

I hear and behold God in every object, yet I understand God not in the least,
Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself.

Why should I wish to see God better than this day?
I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then
In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass;
Walt Whitman

I have talked about the old cat and the open throated swallow before, about how all paths lead one way and how it is hard to look away from the intestine spilled across the yard and how hard it is to still welcome the cat home, as he washes the scene away with his pink tongue. He does not think like I do about the bird, whose I know from its persistent calls throughout the day. I think too much of it and feel nothing; I push it from the yard to under the bushes and hope to never see it again. Later the old cat will rub against my leg and I will pet him and he will purr, knead my feet if I let him, and, in time, neither of us will remember.

It might be April still, but it is as cold as February and the wind is unrelenting. I wanted to sit by the creek today, but the wind did sing as I went to the car and I thought better of it. Instead of changing my setting, I set to change myself. I imagine that I am just a set of floating eyes. Without the aid of my glasses, I watch a blur, as though the world is masked by a shroud. How easy a shift can be. It reminds me of locusts; grasshoppers in their swarming phase. When the population becomes to great, the food supply becomes too little, ordinary garden bugs become the thing of plagues. They change from droll greens to pink and yellows. They create a noise that makes this wind outside of my window sound like the mew of a kitten. People say their incisors can draw human blood.

This is the world that we inherit: locusts swarm, cats tear the song from birds. They know nothing else. We do our best to walk on.

Listen: let's make love like praying mantises. I'll bite off your head and suck out your innards and you, decapitated, will fill me with the seeds. In time I'll hollow out a twig and lay down thousands of eggs like the froth on milk. You'll be dead. I will be soon thereafter. In time our larva babies will wriggle out; they will know nothing of us, but the swift acrobatic motion they will use on their prey, whose gaze will be lost in their smooth green faces.