HOME | NEWS | MASTHEAD | AWARD | ARCHIVES | SUBSCRIBE | SUBMIT | LINKS
God is the Dream We Sleep to Find
Steve AlmondBack in the Adirondacks, near the soft sand of Lake Lucerne, where sunfish glittered like giant dimes and silt licked between my toes, in the late creamy days of summer, at dusk, in a grove of pines where I went off in search of some restless idea or feeling I couldn’t quite pin down, a purer sense of what it meant to be alive, the sum of consciousness, on this particular day, in the heavy stirred air of August, I received a revelation of death. It was a dark door, nothing more. There was no final Father, no heaven of forgiveness. You were dead and you ended.
I thought of no one else and ran crazy for a minute, then stood in a cloak of shadow. Furry wood things did not emerge from the forest to cheer me. I wept. In the mocking smell of sap I wept. I was eight years old.
This was the summer I spent in a cabin with my grandparents, both of whom I loved more than I would allow. My grandma and her endless buttery meals, her raspy songs, her green crochet needles knit together under the lamp, like tiny axes whet and whet. My grampa leaning over the checkerboard with his beautiful crooked teeth. They were burdened people made joyous by simple goods. I should have kissed each of them more than I did. We waste so much of our hearts. Only the dying keep a full account. In their moment of passing, the exact amount is revealed on our tongues, which turn black with regret.