Falling for you, for me

What is the point of this journey,

with its tiresome food 

and its wearying wilderness sameness,

(I have a map of Egypt in my wallet)

with its thirst and nostalgia (I see you have one too), 

its uncertain horizon,  

its lacking of any sense of where or when? 

Where did the time go?

It rode in our packs and our pockets,

through the sea, under the mountain,

across the desert

a vagrant doxology 

from “in the beginning”

to “world without end”, 

until it arrived

at this very nanosecond we call now.

This time being threshold –  all there is,

infinitely thin and containing all worlds.

There is no hook I can sling 

to recapture yesterday,

or to grapple my way back to it.

There is no line I can cast 

to reel in the future, no tightrope of time

I can cross to tomorrow.

Suspended between voids

on this threshold of now

that I never cross.

We say this is our story (I say this is my story):

Inundating and subsiding water, 

an ark, falling from quarantine 

into a new world, and

Wilderness, wander until time is rinsed from our journey, 

then stumble across a dry gap in Jordan water 

into a new land, and

Through the Jordan water again

in the arms of a cousin, hear

the accompanying applause of heaven, and

Desert, hunger, the beguiling idolatry 

of bread and fame and power, and

A near-infinite line of thin thresholds

and from One of them, One of us 

falling through death 

into a new creation,

holding on for dear life,

to us, for our dear life.

Falling 

for the life of the world,

the way people do, the way

every I fell for you, 

and every you for me. 

I say this is my story. (We say this is our story):

Quarantine - across

the inescapable threshold of now,

and now, and now again, 

and time, and time again, 

falling out of time 

into mystery.