the most beautiful thing: compass points down
There’s a compass with my name on it buried here inside my chest. It sits quietly under the cooing doves and vibrates slightly against the sometimes off-rhythm beating of my heart. And it has a few due East marks where the ship once set sail towards and West has been forever deemed a destination of past. North is irrelevent in the face of flying snow and geese returning, softly burning for the gray spring skies and millet grown taller in coal-dusted air. And then there is South.
South is not so much a reflection of direction, as it is a mandate. And it is not so much a mandate of flight pattern as much as non-pattern. “Go,” it says softly, barely audible above the nesting songs of birds come and still, and yet I hear it clearly. Go. Not down, not down to something or someone waiting, maybe/maybe not, but in. Go in. Go southward into unmarked territories of pelvic floor and rooted soles, of creaking knees begging for a run again pretty please in this lifetime, of navels stretched and tucked and pushed against others right and wrong and feeding from her not forgotten but lost somehow, and floors carpeted with wood, sweat, tears and dropped flags on silver poles, and of tomorrow. Territories of tomorrow in this grain of sand that is today.
Because, you see, tomorrow does not wait hovering and wondering overhead in the evaporating clouds of today. It waits down there, Southward and beyond any break from the grinding hours and fluorescent lights, be them illuminating the best of intentions or not – down there as a seed begging for attention down there, down there where light is needed and water is honored and nutrients need only whisper a word and are absorbed into strength and goodness and calm bright bright brilliance. h Go South and I will find it, whether I stay here under these lights, or travel to the brightness of others. Go South, the most beautiful direction by which I’ll ever traverse my world.
the most beautiful thing 