A THIN VEIL BETWEEN EARTH AND HEAVEN

Lake Michigan Diary 69 (giggle)

In Canto 8 of the Purgatorio, Dante exhorts: “Sharpen here, reader, your eyes to the truth, for the veil now surely so fine that passing within is easy.” A colleague says that she and her husband, in their world travels, search for places in the world where the veil between this earth and heaven is extremely thin.

Devil’s Tower in Wyoming. The little camp between Woods and Siskiwit lakes on Isle Royale, where nobody ever goes.A Quaker meeting, at times.In the Garden of the Suicides at Pride Institute Treatment on Purgatory Creek. Walking on the north side of Devon St with its spicewalla and ricewalla, savory and sweet. The Vale of Health in Hampstead, where the veil is a vale. In a nursing home. Dollywood. Uluru. A murmuration of starlings. The crypt of Chartres Cathedral in silence. A Chinese worker cemetery in Larsen Bay, Alaska.Visiting Stripper Night at The Jockey Club, Pittsburgh, PA circa 1983. Certain high grounds in Ireland where there are cenotaphs to people who have drowned, but there is only the occasional puddle. The simultaneous acid-sugar jolt after a sip of a good Riesling, as if you had sucked on the head of an electric eel, if you’ve ever had the experience, and who hasn’t? A baptism in a river, with no expectation for forgiveness, but a revelation nonetheless. The inferno towering, the zeppelin, incinerating, oh the humanity! Jim Hawkins seeing Israel Hands in Treasure Island underwater and dead twice, being both shot and drowned. Hearing a shepherd at the top of a mountain in Corsica calling another shepherd at the top of another Corsican mountain yonder with a yodel, and you, tired in a heavy backpack, in the valley between them looking for what echoes all around you. A drum line marching outside your bedroom and heading away to a stadium five blocks over so hurry and catch up! Your grandfather’s cheap aftershave—slapped!, without his permission. Dopey patriotism when one of ours wins the gold at the Olympics. Jumping into deep water of a deliciously different temperature, dropping bare feet into that cold spring and feeling the ankles ache at its frigid wisdom. Romeo gasping over Juliet: O true apothecary!—thy drugs are quick. Lake Michigan, reflecting some celestial business beautifully just when I’m cold in my winter coat picking up dog dooky and can’t be open to the f-ing lathe of heaven, God, so sue me!