Experience of life: its routines; the workaday world;

home leisure, reassuring in their way, buttress

our sense of life’s rational elements, its continuity

upholding our need for a beginning, a middle, and an end,

and awareness of place along the line, holding off conflicts

that bear no resolution: the creep of illness and indifference;

the shadow of death; the forces of chaos at the unwelcome

perimeter, where we struggle mightily to keep them.

And yet, and yet, the flicker of delight across the broad

brow and heaven is full of the laughter of chaos: unexpected,

whimsical, even dangerous unto death. Such chaos, to be

viable as the sparkle of life, has been disarmed — or at least

held back, so we may absorb the humor, drink deeply of the

absurd, and emerge revived and refreshed: with fears, with

life led to the edge of exhaustion, to the place of the void;

restrained, firmly restrained, I suspect by the love of God.