Staying awake

  In the resonant silence was the multiform totem of all his past lives as a boy who yelped and snarled amd scampered like so many wild animals and then as a youth who learned to shape his words to fit the hearing of others as fearful of him as they were of themselves and then as a father of three children, toothless furies, all of whom would run away to some neverland, though he could still see the conscientious discontent in the downward slant of their eyes that would suddenly look up and straight through you like glass, and now there was no one but himself and his memories, no wife rooted to this earth, no kin to whom to be kind or kind to him, lying awake in the darkness perhaps for the last time or maybe not, but still good practice for staying awake when his whole world would go away, a ritual he had begun as a child when he first felt the wind outside his window cutting through him like grass and the leaves just out of reach fluttering in the early light, he listening now also to the hum and roll of his breathing, feeling blindly for the iron thread that sews together all beginnings and endings, his chest heaving like the hills and mountains that roll and swell and fall as surely as any ocean, though it was also true his body had always been alien to him and, if possible, more so now that it was but a shelter that was collapsing about a stranger who would soon enough depart, leaving no one nowhere and nothing to hand on to another except that which, being all in all, is nothing but a hope and a prayer to the living.