When I say that progress isn’t linear I mean to say that my house was built
on a horse farm. I mean to say that everytime I take a step I could be dancing
on buried horse dung or waltzing on top of a horseshoe. I mean to say
that when it rains the romantic dreams of a beating heart, apprehension screams
its a doorknocker, and the little girl in my heart knows it has to be horse hoofs.

The rain is so old that I am confident that it knows the secret of magnitude.
It can’t help but mock evolution with its knitting needles just as I can’t help
running through the streets of my neighborhood trying to save littered worms
with popsicle sticks. I know it smells like dead fish and my mind sounds like
the white noise on the end of a tapedeck but I can’t help but whisper:
"This futility is so pretty." So is magnitude and desire and the idea of silence.

My grandfather who will die in days whispers "Listen closely dear,
the most valuable thing in the world is a glass of water." As I stare into his weary eyes
I think I can tell you that this is not his secret: for my grandpa who arrayed
his hospice room with old photographs and books on tapes of Westerns,
his secret is not that mundane. His secret is the one Tantalus has whispered
to me in a dream as he discussed the threshold: "just because you know you can’t drink"
he says "doesn’t mean you don’t get thirsty."