We have all eaten of the fruit of life, not knowing we have swallowed its death-seeds. The seeds sprout into weeds tall as trees, choking. Smothered or not by distraction or belief, this we share: death as a shared feast, suffering as our communal drink.

Death, like God, is still much too big for us. If this book were bare as a clean-picked bone, each syllable would point to that desolate beauty. But a book is built of words, and words imply a Great Struggling to Understand. Death laughs outside the boundaries of human understanding. While we huddle in libraries and houses, apartments and churches, parks andcafés, Struggling to Understand, death chomps sedately on our bones, lazy with victory.

A living corpse. A phrase which has hatched behind my eyes (seemingly without thought) and now lives as a hot pulsation in my brain as I walk, write, and sleep. I have been told that there is a miniature death in every breath: the millisecond after inhale and before exhale, when we hang in the hollow spaceless. This is another way of saying that we are all of us resurrected beings, and all of us not, our corpses sliding tight behind us in the vernix of birth.

This is another way of saying that “now” is nothing but a gathering place where the past, present, and future congeal, fester, and proliferate. To be a seer is to know that these three time-persons are a single Holy Trinity. The Holy comes not from a singular time-body, but from all three: Squatting in the gathering place. Breaking bread. Laughing.

A hunger to be small as a scrap of light, warmingstrangers without being seen, to be lost in the crack between cobblestones, in the sliver of space between lovemaking bodies, to be nothing more concrete than the exhalation of dust from a book. The urge to be obliterated and yet held on the surface of the skin: this is the paradox of the oppressed.

Maybe if I can allow Death to eat with me, in the dirt, sharing my beans and bread with soil-dampened fingers, if I can allow her into my garden, to sit with me squarely and matter-of-factly on a blue bench, if I can climb into her dark womb and allow her to contract me out into the bracing air of life—Maybe then I will be brave enough to stay sane, and by sane, I mean alive, and by alive, I mean in procreative communion with Death.