Divine Dementia, Night Camp, Utah, 22 February 2017

Confusions multiplied in the nocturnal murk of my language.
Given that everything, from the infinitely small, to the infinitely extensive
Changed and was changing, however slightly, with each infinitesimal
Instant in passing, how was there any similarity at all? What was there
To change that was not wholly change? The dark God of everything
Encountered me on my way back down to Egypt and sought to kill me
In my night camp, as He had done to one before, but this time I had no sons.
I had one daughter and no idea which sacred incantation could save me or her
Secure from all alarm. Thus, I muttered to myself, we must endure
Transfiguration without understanding, events carved out of cutbanks,
But we can't seem to stop ourselves from trying, demanding to understand.
The river ran unusually fast and noisily beside me, thick with sediment
Like my thoughts. It was only a pebble in the ancient text, that narrative bit
About the God who sought to destroy His own messenger and was thwarted.
It haunted me because I thought, in my own gravel-grinding head, I could sense
That which was that was not wholly change in the way a tale could remain
Shifting in context, pronouns ripped out of referential grounding, but
Retain, even perhaps enhance or attain an identity as itself, as apart
From the greater narrative carrying it along. Change creates the illusion
Of something ancient and unchanged by changing it, by making contrast.
That fragment of an encounter between the God bent on destruction
And His messenger of blood grew larger because of being reduced, stripped
And isolated within a stream of later, louder, plaited words and rush.
Something in the paradox felt like a dark and emptied hint about paradoxes,
But then I fumbled it, lost it, and it tumbled away from me, and there I was
Beside the river that had carried and then buried that memory,
That fragment, my idea, as it would carry me away and bury me.
In the night camp, the storied survivor who would never fully enter Zion
Struggled to remember what had happened, why the phrasing he wanted,
"Bent on destruction" would not come to him, what he held in common
With the ever-shifting dark around His question what had shifted, what
Remained. What was ever there before it changed? What was there to change?