Error, my love, stay close. Without you, I’d never find the exit from this hell of mirrors. Look – another dawn stains the lunatic fringes of my sky in tints of crimson. Washable. Ready to wear. The monitor at my bedside shows my heartbeat skipping like a scapegoat. Who was that mitered man, and what was he doing in my chambers? Get back, you paperweights! I brandish my scepter like Aaron’s rod. My staff is stiff. It comforts me.
Error, you were the first and best of all my teachers. Once I found I could not leave my office for a pilgrim’s road, you drew dark nights on the insides of both my eyelids. With Him there is no left and right, I told my faithful. Bull or no bull, your matador’s cape goes to heel with the horns of any dilemma. Sweet Teresa may have been pierced, riven. A true saint. But it’s you I love.
Errors mount, they say. Mount of Horeb, Sinai, Zion, Olives. Mound, as it were, of Venus. Crowned with the shining head of a life, blind eye precious in His sight. Life and more life, life, life! A priest who can’t get it up is no priest. Shorn of foreskin, the holy hill must never again come under the shadow of so-called sacred groves. The mark of Cain printed in a baptismal font.
Solitude is a luxury denied the truly righteous, if they exist. Alone on my side of the net, I serve. My life is a service. However much my mind may go errant, this stubborn donkey knows to head straight for the oats. No sins without blessings, no blessings without sins. And everything made perfect in His sight. His all-seizing eye. I feel myself watched by the hour and the gargoyle minute, by night and by day. They grow and shrink through the seasons like all living things, thinking they’ll endure forever.
Is it about endurance then, my love? Ha! Give me nine months of contemplation and I too might bear some unimaginable offspring. Try me! But He knows best. I could wear a hairshirt, practice auto-flagellation, but the agony of childbirth is a blessing reserved for women. We priests are called to imitate Christ, giving birth from the tomb instead of the womb, yawning portal under the altar where we perform our redundant magic, food into flesh. Open, like this straw they’ve stuck where the breath goes in: extreme suction. One more river to cross.
Or am I in error again?
Or is she – at last – in me?