Last Afternoon in the Park with Heather

You can’t fake showing up.

She knelt over me with the black umbrella, her face sculpted against the sky. The rainclouds rushed together, massy and edged with gold. Only a moment before, the sky was so bright my left eye watered when I tried to look at her. 

I closed my eyes and lay back, listened to her voice, and slid tall heads of grass between my fingers. The overgrown swayed around us.

The wind kept her up last night, but she wasn’t angry. Anger seemed childish then. And life seemed carved out of marble, or else full of the stuff marble means. Bernini must have seen this. This much. Rain.

And we tried to name, and we couldn’t name, the richness. We played games with our tongues, trying to understand. And we finally grew quiet.

Here our only need is

Incarnation.