Who was that person?  What did it feel like to be him?  This I can’t say.

I can only give the perspective of the 4-year-old boy he held in his arms, and danced around to ‘Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head’.

There was death to come for him much later, and trauma for me in the next few years, trauma he softened by making me bacon and eggs, by hitting fly balls so I had to run and dive.

In this world, he sat in the diner, in a black mesh tank top and teal sweatpants, eating a toasted bran muffin with butter.

In the upper worlds, he fills a doorway with warmth and light, warmth and light pouring out.

You are what’s kept me going.  You are every positive word that comes out of my mouth.

The richness in this world–I saw it first on the top of your dresser:  brewer’s yeast, bee pollen pellets, fascinating rubbery vitamin E, iron, garlic…

You’re getting dressed in the late afternoon, to go into New York to the Academy, sweating a bit in your dress shirt.

Now you’re deep into Alzheimer’s, all your diplomas in a box.  I’m playing with your beautiful white hair.  Even then, with your barrel chest, you give me a bear hug.

Do you need anything now?  I doubt it.  But let me give anyway.  May all those hugs, and all those times I played with your hair, reach you in the upper worlds, a thousand times amplified.   So within God’s embrace, for a second, you smile a different smile.

The grass grows very green and thick; it pours from your grave.  Not surprising at all.

The mystery of the living room window, the membrane.

The clouds right now are the Pillars of Creation.

Above a shaggy horizon of tropical trees–shapes of hydrogen from deep space!

Heat beyond our conception, surrounded by absolute zero…

*

Miami, in a heat wave.  There’s no going out in the day.  Sun-blasted streets.  Ocean hotter than blood.  Fish dying.

We’re lucky to live in a bubble–with AC, supplies, work.

A biosphere.  In the big window, masses of trees.  Continued in here by plants.  By you, moving from room to room.

The sun and trees, with their roots in still-wet earth, interact.  You breathe, speak, laugh…

The window somehow keeps out the heat, lets in the light.  Keeps out, I think, the silence of the melting tar.

We’ve evolved to handle the chilled air on our bare skin. 

Delicate creatures, comfortable only at 76 *F.  Moaning otherwise.  Feeling infinite gradations within that one degree.

Music plays in the dome.

News of the world.  War, hate.  Families grieving.  I have a membrane to let in a taste of this, screen out the rest.  You, less so, are crying.

The rooms are harmonious.  But the candles scare me, the naked flames.  The knives scare me, the naked blades.

In room 3, you’re working.

Looking up from my work, I’ve been tracking the sun’s progress.  It’s now quite low.

A green parrot lands on the palm in the window.  Flies off into heat waves, like Noah’s dove; does not return…

The sun is now pink!  A perfect disc, etched, with no glare. 

You come with me to the window; holding hands we watch it touch the trees, sink into their green jelly.

It’s time to go out, in the so-called cool of the evening.  Into air like oozing fur.  The beast has found water, and shade. Shivers with pleasure, which we feel as breeze.

Other domers, in doorways, test the air.  Creep outside.  Across the street, surrounded by industrial fans, people are gathering for a drink.  Chilled wine, frosted beer mugs.  We join them.

Salem Village–outpost of godliness.  Surrounded by forest where the Wabanaki are massing.

Penetrated by the Devil.  The invisible world is everywhere.  Witches meet in the home of a pious family, right in front of them!

A strange creature beside the path at twilight. Turns into 3 women who fly off.

The specter of the old widow, suddenly in the room, tortures the sick girl with inhuman seizures.

The leading citizens knock on the widow’s door, examine her body. Find a teat, between her legs, where a dog or a hog must suckle.

Even Salem has fallen away.  Fewer attend church.  Fewer are baptized.  Tempted by the Quakers, or by slight innovations in doctrine.  There have been thefts. 

The family returns from the long sermon, to study further in the cold parlor.  In a hothouse of gossip, feuds.  Sunk in the invisible world.  With the Wabanaki at the first trees…

Next door, the sick girl still sees them butcher her parents.

In the meeting house, she faces her tormentor.  “Your movements, right now, are controlling my movements.”

The witches are hanged in small groups.  The churchgoer.  The one whose decades of loneliness broke her.  Buried outside the village.

But more and more are afflicted.  And more and more are signing the Devil’s book.

Their specters eat red bread and go forth in an assault.

God could make it stop.  The Devil is not free here, only on a long leash.  To do God’s bidding.  To chastise.

Finally, he can go to town.  Create demons of a whole new order. 

Play with the already-traumatized.  Throw the 80 year-old in jail, in winter.

The village is immersed in the Devil’s nature.  In the forest, the shamans of the Wabanaki sacrifice their firstborn.  Are becoming impervious to musket-fire.

A Black servant accuses the Governor’s wife.  A reverend is hanged.

The villagers are cleaving harder to God.  Crowding the church.  Getting baptized as adults.  They agree with the finest points of doctrine.  When will it be enough?