Reg Saner

from “The Magpie Scapular”
“None there be, can rehearse the whole tale.” Thus runs a line from the Dead Sea Scrolls. And I, once letter perfect in verities of rote memory, ask the mind: "Tell me, you who do the knowing for me. Are you anything beyond fancy twitches inside a skull?" The mind answers. “No, not really. I'm chemistry. Traversed by something that pretends it isn't a thing.”

How candid. Therefore, given our situation, any life worth living must, like the mind, contain something of great value it knows isn't there.

Maybe the origin of life is simple as that. Or at least its persistence. Like trying to make yourself come true. Maybe that's what I've climbed this mesa to believe, or rediscover, or to pretend I have.

Then, as a fast magpie no different from dozens of others gives a swoop right by me, my surprise for no reason makes a human sound of spontaneous delight that isn't even a word. And suddenly my motive in going out to meet dawn is clear as our desire to be created by what we love.

For that half second, my body truly believes what it knows. By the good light of morning it knows without “reasons” that our highest reason is the joy that says “Yes, let these things be as they are, and me as I am now, within them.”

On which subject, merely my looking around freely speaks its mind to winter yucca, to field weeds, to a coyote now gone, and a falcon. To a young pair of mule deer. To those silly lovely acolytes, my dawn companions, the magpies. To the morning moon, full last night and still fairly high in the west, wearing the most familiar face in the world, pulling at the waters of the world, as it has ever since that world was a circle, and at us with a motion almost too old to end.

Through air fresh as that look each inner child once was, and set out to be, the moon's present ghost of blue stone stares down as if in astonishment at finding the face I am now, all the way here; inside this life, given to question; inside the weft of its moment.