What I Do Know Is This

I was sleeping and then I was not. To sleep or not to sleep, that is the quotidian.

Thinking of my children and my wife. Wondering what I can possibly do or mean for them.

Thinking about the poets I have known. The many fine poets I have known. For whom saying what they know is everything. Was everything. Will be everything.

Poets who stare into the air and take from it everything they might possibly mean. Saying whatever their breathing in of that air might make of them.

The wind moving in that air might say to them.

There is an ache that will not stop. An ache in the night that brings one forth. That unfolds one. That skins one. That opens one like a hunter’s knife.

And takes one’s insides out. Spills them.

Thinking about God and what he might want from me. Why he would wake me and drag me out. Spill me out of my sleep into this broad waking. This hard, dark waking.

What I do know is this. I want my children home. I want my wife warm and yessing. I want my God warming my family like a fire that knows nothing but a banked burning. All night and day. In this cold weather.

I want to say, “All will be well. All manner of thing will be well. Forever.”

I want to say this all night. I want to whisper this in their ears. I want to murmur this through the night.

I want to say to God, “All will be well. All manner of thing will be well. Forever.”

And so I do this. Even in this weather. Even in this dark season.

I do not know what it means. I do not know why I mean it. I do not know what I am doing.

All I know is this. This waking. And this saying. And a desire to ask forgiveness of everyone.