Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
smiling by the windows looking out
in our directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is

– W. S. Merwin

Certain things are perfect. (I am not one of them, but even this is a matter of perspective; given enough times, everything disintegrates into the necessary.) Today the rain was perfect, and perfect was the day, and there was even something perfect in the sugared glass and metal tissue and throbbing lights and twisted faces of the car accident that slowed my slow way home.

Thanksgiving is next week. Last Thanksgiving M. was three weeks into a three month caging in a windowless detention center; this Thanksgiving it will be enough to spend together. And there is so much more, from the growing being in the belly of my sister to my marriage and slow shuffle east, from this house and our home and our hurrying business to our move and our love and our everything.

Still, no matter how much I give it, the past gulps down each new day as if starving. How can anyone stand living at the brink of the world? I keep peering over the edge, and it is dizzying.

In relationships, be they platonic or romantic or professional, this tends to be a gift: I’m rarely disabused of the assumption, and many people–for the most part, it seems–not only prove to be strangely and marvelously enigmatic, but appreciate being acknowledged as such. In other arenas, though, this tendency toward romanticism quivers between heartbreak and an embarrassing foolishness. I keep thinking I’ll grow out of it, but if anything it keeps getting worse. (Is there a career or profession that is the opposite of a critic? I wish I could spend my life pointing out what is frighteningly beautiful in things.)

Ah well. There are worse problems to have, certainly, and certainly there are worse attitudes with which to feel flooded.

Also, I have been having the most hideous dreams.

We arrived home this evening, to a city of licking rain and fog from plains of whited ice and astringent cold, and though the journey was wonderful the sensation of casting one’s poor exhausted body into the placid security of a familiar home has a sweetness no strangeness can touch. Home has its own delights, and its grateful embrace of clumsily-packed luggage and mud-slung coats is gentler and more perfect than that of even the most considered hotel. (Strange that I’d never considered–nor imagined–myself competent in the strange art of home-making; strange to realize that despite myself the patient gods of the hearth have elected to knit a place for me here.)

Is this year almost over? I am not sure whether to race in exhausted relief toward the next, or to brace myself for another hurricane of expectation, or to shut my eyes and turn around and fall happily backwards into a snow-angel of beauty and trust and unfathomable chill. It is funny to think that try as I might, I might be capable only of all three.

It’s four in the morning, and my nocturned self is gratefully watching another sleeping, finally, beneath the weight of a heavy past. It’s four, and I can only breathe.

I imagine that parenthood is one of those life events that forces an entire reevaluation of not only one’s attitudes, but one’s foundational assumptions of the world; I imagine that having a child can’t help but result not only in the extension of a new scale of time, but a new baseline of significance, where the treasure of one’s own life somehow pales in comparison to the life of this new and unspeakably perfect being. I suppose it can’t quite be the same, but I remember feeling a similar lightning bolt of unexpected and unimaginable certainty when I met M (over seven years ago, which seems both forever and yet only an instant), and remember the dizzying reciprocation, and the humbling and sweet process of togethering a new worldview in light of it. I am usually a flexible and accepting person, but to have our future challenged–or even just interrupted–like that just did and does not fall within the realm of my own understanding. (His lawyers couldn’t believe immigration had acquiesced; I couldn’t believe they’d taken so long to do so.) In any case, it seems the various letters and calls and enlistments helped. In any case, from here it will be ever so much more easy.

I would wish for everyone to know a love such as this in their own lives, and in the same breath would never want anyone to have to go through such an unwanted procedure of caged separation.

I am so happy to have him home.

He’s home!

I am delirious with happiness and exhaustion (I picked him up last night and we drove back together and sleep after that proved hopeless; we were up until dawn stunned-but-not-speechless at this sudden freedom and dizzying reversal of seemingly unalterable circumstance) but, for the first time in months, feel whole.

Love makes life so very tenuous, and so achingly worthwhile, and I am merely grateful that both he and my heart survived.

In which I sing a round with myself.

I don’t remember learning the song, but I do remember it’s many hundreds of years old; I don’t remember where I first heard it, but it reminds me of home.

(Why do people hold hope in such high regard? I do not understand. If I could resign myself to an inevitable–no matter how cruel–I could let go, and avoid the mocking pain of daily expectation dashed, and fractured, and dashed again. But hope keeps dancing–perhaps today! or today! or?–and I like a fool keep gasping on.)

Ah well. I cannot complain: there are worse fates, and worse sentences, and I have never loved the holidays. I shouldn’t complain: I am not the one detained, nor subject here to the cruel exclusions of alienage. Still, I miss him, and still I worry, and still I do not understand how the roulette of birthplace can render one subject to such bland and flabby injustice. Immigrant detention is ostensibly an administrative necessity, and not meant to be punitive, but I cannot conceive of being locked for over a month in a room with no daylight as anything but punishment. (M’s skin has turned ghostly; it has been over four weeks, and I have never seen him so pale.)

Meanwhile, I go through the motions, and hold to routine. (I am not sure whether to be grateful for or shaken by the fact that the world is so immune to rupture; that the world, despite personal upset, plods dementedly ahead.) I attend to my papers. I submit invoices. I manage inventory. I pay the bills. I try, and I fail, to sleep.

I don’t know what I expected. This entire planet is a blister of irritation, infected and teeming in a universe otherwise pure; to be alive and a part of it is to ache. What is there to do but love, then? What is there to do but weep?

I do not believe in God, but I believe in the suffering that knotted the Rosary above into being. It came into my fingers from the more skillful fingers of someone indefinitely detained in the slow-grinding cogs of the fragmented machine that is the US immigration system; it came into my hand from the hands of someone who deserves just as much to be free; it was delicately braided from scraps into meaning by a man for whom sunlight is a fading memory, and who is waiting, patiently, for relief.

The past few weeks have been harrowing, and disheartening, and eye-opening, and more. The past few weeks saw my beloved–a green card holder and lawful US resident since the early 90s–detained by ICE upon returning from a conference in Europe, and held without a hearing (or alternatives or freedom or sunlight) since. One of the detainees in his block wove the Rosary above; I cannot believe in God, but I wear it.

My beloved will be released. Unlike the majority of immigrant detainees, we can afford legal counsel, and with such an obvious case, and his repatriation is just a matter of time. But there are tens of thousands of others–the Rosary-maker among them–being held indefinitely and in deplorable conditions, guilty only of being pilgrims too late.

I am guilty of being a citizen of a country that would cage people so cruelly. I believe the latter is worse.