Chaos as Magical Thinking, or Swoon

Hypothesis

One day Jesus makes breakfast, fools his friends into a meal of fish and wine. Consciousness is a fickle story, a theory of sunlight, one part betrayal, one part frustration, one garden party gone so late nothing good can come of it. My one rare talent eludes me, so quantum I can’t zoom in far enough to see it, no matter how much light I throw toward the receiving screen. Sometimes I’m all mint sauce and lamb chops rare enough to surprise, like the loaf I baked that the priest tore open, burst of sun-dried tomato blood. In the body of night lives the owl, in the wound of a tree, the sapsucker, its brilliant red head an oblation. On the second day we transformed what was left of the lamb into energy, drank the last glass of Sangiovese. Sometimes memory curls languidly in a far reach of my manifold brain, living under an assumed name, and I remember how the waves rolled over my desire to swim with sea turtles along the Kaanapali Coast, how I repeated o god o Jesus please put me down on that deserted bit of shore over there, and sail away with your happier passengers. I’ll lie here on the dock, gutted and guttural, my insides a wreck, the sea turtles almost angelic, almost walking on the water.