The Frosted Vigil

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The seller keeps its own eyes.

The cloister above rings and softens with the big metronome of our days' bells, meals,

the scrape of shoes and passage, but below time settles differently.

Stoner remembers the weight of boots that have not worked the estiers for centuries.

The tread imprints itself on memory here, as a feature pair that passed left a braid

of shadow in the mortar.

Breath hands thicker in the lower air, not merely because of places rolled with damp and

age, but because the seller holds a private cold that settles in a manner more particular

than any ordinary frost.

It is a cold that has a manner of being, the way an animal has a way of moving.

It comes with its own patience.

I descend the narrow stair and slow steps.

I have learned to trust her.

My fingers test a rail as if seeking a familiar rhythm.

The rail is worn to a softness where palms have travelled over generations, the wood remembering

every thumbprint of habit.

The rosary at my belt knocks once against a rusted key I have carried since I first learned

the chores of the abbey.

That key is an old companion heavy for its size, its teeth filed down by hands that were

perhaps clumsy than mine, it's wring a tangle of memories.

I have capped out the keys.

I have likewise kept other secrets.

The keeping comes a practiser, a key on the cord, a confession in the pocket of a habit.

The small lies a man permits himself to survive the day.

But secrets, like coins breed company, they gala companions until they are more populous

than truth.

It is for that reason I need to tell someone what I saw.

A secret spoke and allowed changes shape it begins to be accountable.

We know the sellers are a repository for the things forbidden to light in common days,

the licorice wrapped in oakcloth, jaws of tincture whose labels are written in a hand,

so careful it feels like prayer, a ledger of names cramped small enough fat one must lean

close with a candle to read.

We break our vows for necessity more often than we admit and preserve in those low rooms

the artifacts of the bending old ex-photos, sealed letters from benefactors, a box of teeth

kept for reasons nobody alive can recall.

The flags done that gave up the object had been placed with intention and then forgotten.

Its underside carried a hairline and seemed that resisted the touch the way closed I resist

a finger.

I had to pry it with my fingers and the fine bit of iron I carried for such stubborn

joints the stub of a nail rewrote into use on this.

It yielded grudgingly.

When the slouch hifter the smell that rose was not the rot of mold or the metallic cry

of fresh blood.

It was something like the hush before snowfall hollow, metallic cold that filled the

palm and called along my wrist.

Not cold in the sense of a wind that smacks a man's face but a cold that arrives as a

silence a subtraction of warmth like a hand taking a coin back.

It had a clarity to it and almost crystalline cut and for a moment my whole body tightened

against it as if remembering a winter that had not been mine.

There was too a sound of faint bell note as if a tiny vessel had been tapped under the

stone.

It's Editone.

Beneath the linen wrapped with the kind of care one keeps for things one fears to harm

lay a pillar of wax more enough to cup.

Its size made me think first it was a votive the sought place before were stained and

thanks were in plea but the wax was wrong.

It was not white nor the warm ivory of beeswax but a wash bluish think the colour of river

eyes at depth.

It was as if an undertone of frost lived in its core as if the form had been poured from

wintered itself.

Sigils had been traced into its side not the need to even strokes of a scribe but shallow

listening for a rose that caught light like frozen veins.

Around the base iron nails had been set into the wax in a crude crown.

The nails were not ornamental they were insistence as hammered in place and left as claims.

When I breathed the air in front of my face frosted I felt full ash even then feeling

ridiculous as a child might a shadow behind a curtain and yet there was an authority

in what I felt.

The mind keeps a ledger of permissible sins or list of curiosity as a man allows himself

to inspect.

This held a semi-hand had not yet learned to cross off.

The candle had been kept beneath the linen like the other relics precisely to keep it

from attention and attention I had learned this currency.

I gathered the candle to the table where we keep tools for mending lamps and for the

small practical rituals of our order.

The table is a familiar altar of sorts stones that were worn thin by ears of calluses and

scarred hands jars of cold dust and lard a box of flints kept for the inevitable.

My satchel hung heavy across my shoulder and the rose relay against my palm like a counterway.

I led the candle upon a slug carved with older design circles of joining.

Nots that once served to keep weather and want at bay and let my fingers rest and the

sigils until the chill settled into my fingertips.

Memory came as if cold by those lines brother Thomas working late and humming to him that

always ended sideways.

The old habits reprimand about curiosity colliding a man's spirit like congeal blood.

Child, slough outside the cloister gate on a summer-eaving trivialities and anchors that

had steadied me through nights of watching.

Memory is a map and my fingers trace it as if the sigils themselves had something to do

with recall.

I inspected the wick.

It was black at the end despite the wax parlor as if it had already been tended.

There was a kerophonus about it, a pretronatural practice and a prickle ran down my neck.

A struck affluent with the same method in which not-so-tied quirk practiced, ritualized.

Many of our tasks are performed with little ceremonious.

Habitone's practicality into liturgy, the small embossed brine in the flame that answered

was not warm.

It was a thin blue tongue that did not lean upward, but instead hunched inward and inwardness

that drew, as if with quiet teeth the heat from the space around it.

It was the sword of flame I had lit once before in memory, a lamp before a relic that would

not eat the hand, but now the phenomenon felt concentrated to liberate.

The immediate consequence of lighting it was not just cold, but a recalibration of the

room.

Breath became visible in my hands.

A film of frost began to lace the edges of the carvesage or beneath the candle and

crystalline fingers called Lawn the Pattern as if following lines on a map.

The light was clear and clinical, a blue-white that made the cellar's familiar contours seem

nearly annular.

Shadows behaved as if embarrassed.

They drew back into pockets and left air between them thin and audible.

The candle cast no warmth, yet it coaxed a ruin to a riddeness as if listening errors

had been purged beneath the flagstones then something had leaned toward the sound.

All it wants the act of lighting felt less like me a discovery and more like an exchange.

The small flame answered as if to something below the stone.

Knowledge in places like this is a double-edged thing.

We pride ourselves on learning, on keeping books, on naming the world, and yet there are

corners where naming is a trespass.

Attention is not neutral.

The flame's light was a kind of invitation, and attention might be its price.

I considered putting the candle out.

The prudent thing would have been to cover it with cloth and lock it away.

To report to the prior and let him decide the danger.

My hands betrayed me.

An oldness within me leaned toward the task as a steward with tender failing patient.

I cleared Lynn from the wick, adjusted the iron nail ring at the candleless bay so it

laid evenly and smoothed the wax as one might smooth the hem of a habit.

Each small motion felt subject to an invisible accounting.

The more I moved, the more the seller answered.

The sigils tremble, their frost-stooled is quivering to a rhythm that was not at the candle

but of something deeper in the stone.

There is a nature to attention.

Small repeated acts of regard can and certain circumstances become offerings.

The candle seemed thirst for the attention as a plant thirst for light.

When I cupped my hands around it's light to shield it from a draft, the air inside

my palms went still and thinner than breath.

I felt the soft click of the rosary beads against the iron ring as if the sound were

counting off.

The hole under the flux to made a faint, particular sound then, a dry belling like a throat

cleared of dust.

That sound told me more than the frost.

It told me at what lay beneath was listening and away stones do not always listen.

Curiosity became experiment.

I set a small scrap of cloth between a wick and a silver bowl to see if light would cross

that small bridge.

I tried to pinch the flame between two fingers and turn it away.

The flame did not obscure.

It did not flicker toward the fingers.

Instead it drew with an insistence that was neither gentle nor coarse and that insistence

pressed against the seal beneath the floor.

A hairline crack made itself known in the ring of mortise surrounding the carvesigil.

At first it was a thin line, nearly invisible, then clearer, running from the center like

the opening of a shell.

Along with the crack came a pressure that was not quite physical but which gathered

behind the molars and the eyes.

It carried with it the flavour of a memory that was not mine and the sea smelling faintly

of iron, a bell once tolling for no one.

The sensation of being watched by a thing that has not eyes but knows the geometry of a

heart.

The cellar's breath changed.

Where my breath had been a steady count, it became a chorus of arrested drafts, each

held as if listening.

The candleless flame seemed to answer something below, a reply as precise as a bell's

pitch.

The carve designs and the stones vibrated like a plate struck by a mullet and the frost

crypt in delicate arcs.

Panic when it comes in the cellar is not cinematic.

It is small and tactile.

It manifested as a narrowing of hands around the rosary as the tightening of my jaw until

a phantom scar seemed to tug at the skin.

I thought of the abbot's voice, how he had told us that curiosity is the first step toward

ruin.

I thought of brother Thomas's sideways hint and of the way the in novice's race in the

later afternoons, full of a dangerous bravado.

All these images lined up and found themselves inadequate.

A correct response seemed to be both too simple and too late.

I smothered the candle with the only thing at hand, the threadbare rosary and the palm

of my hand pressed down until the blue light dimmed in the wick hissed.

The eye nail ringed against the rosary beads with a sound like a single distant bell.

The seam did not snap closed.

The cold moved out like the exhale of an animal being eased to sleep.

Then, with a noise like very old ice relaxing, the stone surrender, a crack spread along

the sigil as though the pattern itself had grown teeth and bit the floor from the inside.

The sound was the worst part, a long unwilling terror in like cloth pulled over stones.

For a while an immediate silence that followed everything felt a mord.

The candle sat as if content is for it a frost like a small fag.

Frost still crawled from the fracture, then as a ghostly lekin.

I stacked the slab back into place and forced mortadust into the seam with shaky fingers

as one might press a bandage over a wound.

The seam showed faintly like a scar and my hands were not steady.

I watched them at the basin cold, stoned in the town of Ion on my fingers.

The rosary beads clinked and accounted their runs not for prayer, but to match rhythm

with my pulse and drag it back to the measure I preferred.

The cellar was altered all geometries had shifted a degree.

The ledger of the monastery notes small changes, a tile out of place by a finger's breath

a cupboard closing a little sooner, an image of a saint whose eyes seemed to follow less

often.

These accumulate like a ledger's interest until a reader with sharp eyes can tell that

something is off.

I returned the candle to the stairhead and left it there upon the last one step by

Don, a small blue point in a vast arc.

I wanted it where I could watch it and way out if necessary, I could make it a cautionary

object visible to others coming down in the morning.

The flame returned to faint, gold glow against the early vault of the stair.

I am not a man given to dramatic claims.

I have seen many nights and tended many lamps.

My life here has been covered by repetition and that repetition tempers one's appetite

for the portentus.

What has changed is my understanding of the currency required by certain relics attention

ritual and the steady application of small careful touches.

There are things that to be noticed and will consume notice like a plant consumes water.

The candle was such a thing not malicious in the manner of a beast but indifferent and

hungry where hunger once belonged to another order.

It uses what is offered.

A duty remains even after the instinctive action has been taken.

I have taken to sitting at the stairhead and watching the candle's dorm softens the

cloister's edges.

Men will come and go in their day work unaware of the frigid ember and the step.

That terrifies me because our daily motions are how we pass faith to one another.

There are also how small object may be fed by well-meaning hands.

The novice eager to make offerings may see the pale blue flame and mistake it for a sign.

The infirm brother searching for warmth in his hands may place his palm and expect comfort.

I must confess to keep that from happening.

Confession is not merely the unbotening of guilt it is also a measure that sets the world

to rights by naming it wrong.

To confess is to call witnesses.

So I write what I can and leave it where it will be found if it must be found.

I will describe the sigils as carefully as I am able and the iron rings set into the wax.

The way the wick takes no heat and the way the light burrows call from the room as a beggar

burrows coin.

I will tell of the semen of the sound like all dice and of the breath that is not of this

season.

I will tell what small actions fed it and what I did in a panic of shame and fear.

I will not cloak what I did in heroism.

I acted out of a mixture of curiosity habit and then the shame of being discovered taking

a light to something hidden.

I cannot say whether the thing beneath the stone sleeped because of my actions would

spite them.

That is a question for more learned hands for men who have kept more dangerous ledgers

and who have tended other older candles with different kinds of attentions.

For now I can hold to what I know the candle tends when tended to collect attention as

others collect arms and the price is a subtle loosening of the old bindings.

There are rents in the world's fabric that begin as pimprix when someone peers too long.

Some things were never meant to be found, some things ripple when found the way a stone

ripples are still poor.

The ledger of my days will have this entry.

I lit a light that burned cold and I closed the seam with hands to tremble.

I will remain vigilant at the stair head and in the eyes the cloister keeps, waiting to

see where the frost returns to the flax stone like a promise kept or whether the seam will

one day sigh and open wider than it should.

I have learned that confession can be preventative as much as punitive.

I lay down as a count and with it a caution.

The candle waits small pillow with frost in its core, patient and indifferent.

If some hand less careful than mine finds it and feels the pull, they may think the cold

a mercy or cure.

They will be wrong, attention is its offering.

Farger attention, keep your key on its cord, cover curious hands with gloves and leave

some stones unlifted.

If this reaches anyone who will do more than read, if anyone will stand, wear a stand and

take the weight of the candle into their palms remember.

I need to tell someone what I saw at the world arrived to me like a confession already

written beneath my palm.

I sit now with a ledger open and a trembling pen but the motion of my hand feels secondary

as though in contrast of their own appointments.

The seller keeps its breath low and measured stone joint seep cold and a bowed window emits

a thin, grey dawn that seems surprised to find warmth in the world.

The candle sits on its socket as it sat when I left its mall waxen, as flame the colour

of melted ice.

Outside the monastery is still and the sound of the sea is a distant memory wrapped in

wind.

Inside, the arrow leans toward the candle and I have come to understand that anything

I bring here will soon learn to measure itself against that harsh.

I'm brother Elyse, midfort is now, worn in my limbs and habits, hair cropped in the

tuncher, hand stained by years of work that has more often mended than made.

I have always folded my hands when thinking, counter-breaths before speech, lingoed over

the shape of certain words until they felt dressed for service.

Those manorisons are not mere habit but a small throttle against the impulse the candle

seems to encourage a curiosity dressed up as permission.

I have been a librarian, a keeper of chess, a man more comfortable with a ledger than a

sermon.

There is a cruelty in detail that scholars might mistake for piety.

I've paid that cruelty gladly because of promised order.

How often I imagine my fidelity to order would be enough to hold the darker bay.

In the iris since 1st light, the thing that was not there when I left has returned

to the margin of my world.

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There was a renafrost at the candle's base when I first noticed a circle too precise for

ordinary cold.

It was not the ragged breath of winter.

It was the exactness of something who knew as a geometry of restraint.

Under that ring a sigil half formed, delicate as a frost trace, filigree it appeared as

a fritten by breath.

I have seen marginally scribbled by students amongst alike at flourishes, names, prayers.

This mark was none of those.

It felt like a signature from the thing beneath the world, a notation left not for men

but for other appetites.

The cellar had been, for most of my years here, or room of orders, we keep to ourselves

a place beneath the cloister where relics lay wrapped and ledgered.

A small fire we tended in winter, the smell of tallow and old pages hanging like a

residue.

I used the room as one uses a tool to mend, to catalogue, to place a bracket over a memory

and close the lid.

The months assigned chores and small duties to keep hands honest to mind quite for me.

Catalogging was prayer.

The candle changed the geometry of the utility.

The frost curved like a question at my feet, and the more I looked, the more the instinct

to follow that small line grew an old private force in me that is both scholar and sinner.

I followed the thread.

It began as a fine silk of frost stretching over the flextone, like the echo of a child

stropped through a catching in the grime.

It wound itself from a candle socket across the pit of floor and toward the wall and

still I had avoided since I first found that shuttered hatch months ago.

I had not gone near the hatch because the manner of things kept below had always been a boundary

that I did not speak of in words about enough for novices to hear.

The frost adhered to the mortar and slid over the edges of the steps in an imperceptible

crawl and a parade of ice on stone.

Sometimes I thought the thread of frost moved when I blinked, like a living seam rearranging

itself.

I keep my rosary in my pocket.

The memory of its beads is the only steady thing I have at such moments a bead between

the fingers of panic and calculation.

Frost led me to the hatch.

The wood was swollen with damp, the iron strapped up bound its cord by centers of nails and

pressure, its smell of old sap, and the latent rot of clothes things.

Yet the thread of ice pulled my fingers, and I found myself prying at the old ring with

the rusted key that hands on a cord about my neck.

The key was given to me by the prior when I had been made keeper, it is dented and clumsy,

the kind of key men from many hands, it has saved me small humiliations and open no miraculous

doors.

Tonight it felt heavier than usual, as if it bore a mass beyond iron the weight of responsibility

multiplied by the count of names it had unlocked.

Keys have a grammar in this place they grant they deny they remind.

In my hand it felt like a bone.

Beneath the hatch a stair bit into the dark.

I could feel the candles small flame leaning toward that, and truth of the light had a will,

a slight curvature to the iron of its flame that suggested hunger.

It is wrong, the candle hit drawers warmth and gives nothing back.

As I moved the thin thread of frost and spilled beneath my boots and tucked itself into

the seam of the stair like a suture.

The cellar is air-thin to round me.

My breath came out like smoke, and the hairs on my arms rose.

This sensation was not cold in the familial mortal sense.

It was a subtraction the removal of something that keeps the blood from seeing too far, a

dulling of heat and courage both.

At the bottom of the stair the door waited an iron ring portal, its face scored with the

same sigils that glistened on the candle's walks.

The carvings, chalad by precise, were not crew talismans, they were the work of a hand

that had learned an art in which patience is a chisel.

When I set the candle on a nearby stone to steady my light, the flame cove toward the

doors if sensing a seam in the world.

I had long assumed the candle was curiosity made object this moment reframed it as key.

There is an old metaphor in our order, keys unlock both doors and obligations.

I felt both kinds of weight.

I cried the ring, the iron resisted with the reluctance that carers memory as if the

metal itself knew the cost of opening.

And once a hinge gave it like a hell breath escaped and the room inhaled with me.

A scent rose, metallic anol, precisely the smell of cold metal and the hush that arrives

before snowfall the candle's scent.

Though flame itself makes no scent other than the memory of things burned.

My fingers numb quickly.

The candle's chill travelled through stone to my bones.

The threshold seemed to remember something I had forgotten that attention is not neutral

that it always finds a shape to occupy.

There were signs around a corner table wax shades from years past, a ledger banded with

leather, interest marched unverwritten by a hand that must have known better than to

trust permanence.

The wax stains were not melted in any ordinary way, frost had braided into them as if cold

had tried so the soft wax and patterns to keep text to me.

The old margins bore names, dates and symbols erased and then re-etched so many times that

the edges shimmered with indecision.

It reed like a palimpsist of tending, one hence called an attention another hand, or perhaps

the ledger itself, it set it and turned it into currency.

Someone had kept the candle's hunger in the ledger.

No ordinary monastery kept such a thing.

There is a pressed to attention, attention here is a feeding.

As dawn paused at the bad window, the candle grew at the room with a hunger that was both

patient and precise.

The air thinned.

My breath grew brittle as old bread.

My hands felt numb as though the warmth that defined my living had been loaned out and

not yet returned.

Below the iron door something shifted.

At first it was a small motion, almost a suggestion, a sound like cloth moving in a chest,

or the settling of a thing that had been breathing shallowly for a long time.

It was a movement that meant a world had other layers than the one gentleman and scholars

were willing to mention over our, I had two choices, also the narrow logic of the decision

permitted, tend to candle and hope to bind what slept beneath, or try to close the door

and deny at the seam its ought.

The rusted key that had opened the hatch represented an exaltation of both options.

It could be a tool of restraint or a nail finality.

In my fingers it felt like a bone that could either heal or break.

One choice was to act with the austro cruelty of denial.

The other was to act with the humble cruelty of provision.

Both were forms of feeding as I had come to understand.

I cut my hands about the candle.

The wax was colder than anything I had known as skinned as small crystals formed where

my palm kissed its base.

When I lifted it toward the dose recessed iron ring, the flame flared a blue so purer as

seemed to cut the world into a before and after.

I have seen blue flames and kitchens where poor meats are cooked too fast, but this blue

was not a feat.

The flame did not warm my palm head etched it.

I felt tiny sigils bloom across my skin, not burns but marks that shimmered for a breath

before fading into a dull, pained memory.

There is a vocabulary to pain in the cello.

These marks spoke in a grammar I half-recognized from marginalia and overrides.

In that moment the candle responded as a free did for ritual, leaning into the iron as

though a lock and key had finally found their match.

Then something below answered.

It was not a voice.

It was a movement of stillness, a settling awake that made the stone underfoot remember

how it used to sigh.

There abradeed my lungs and abrade of frost call from a threshold like a gray, no fruit,

seeking purchase.

The ladder of my options condensed into one immediate bodily thing whether the thing beneath

sooth or released would be content to remain sealed or would be given purchase in the

world above.

I could imagine what each outcome might in names and days I could not imagine the sums

in any useful currency.

I will not write what temptation felt like.

Its shape is private and shameful.

In the abbey we are taught to name temptation to fold it into confession, but the immediate

temptation is a tricky animal it argues in the voice of mercy and of curiosity.

Its voice told me that to look was a service and service is our coin.

The split when I might have driven the key into the hatch and slammed the wood closed

was quick.

Another small doctrine guided med nourishment by attention, binding by tenting.

Themselves ancient practices leaned toward the same function, keep the wick for things

satiated enough to remain sleeping.

The ledger's pages had proved that much.

I set the candle into the recess ring.

Its art as if it had always belonged there, the iron cooled around its base.

The flame flared and in that light I saw for the slimmest freely of understanding the

ledger's probes not merely to record but to butter.

The candle asked for tending and tending asked for names.

The response was immediate and exacting.

For us braided itself along the doors edges and licked up the stonework in a slow and

system braid as if the cold was suing seals into the world.

I tasted copper.

My hands were marked by tiny, such alike burns that hummed where the candle had touched

me.

The room quieted as though the world outside the cellar had slightly retreated.

I had contained something, or I had given it room.

The humility of that ambiguity is what haunts me more than any physical mark.

To hold a thing at bay, and to feed it or not opposites, here or there are twin faces

of stewardship.

We tend what would otherwise end.

I sat against the sealed hatch and tried to measure consequence with the ledger.

My hand moved, but the ink would not keep.

The ledger was plaid into frost as if some patient thing below edited my confession mid-sentence.

I wrote again and again, and each time the words blurred.

The ledger is not a testament, but a mirror to an arrangement at collects names, dates,

and small notations of attention.

Names are not simply names here.

Their copper coins rendered soft by frost, they are the meal the candle balances on its

cold flame.

To tell a name allowed is to lend it weight.

To write it is to hand it over interest.

I had thought my obedience was enough.

It was not.

The ledger showed me the economy of caretaking.

The immediate aftermath is a spreading harsh that feels like a health thing exhaling

slowly.

The candle's light to windows to faint glow were it once stood.

Its absence is signaled by a memory of cold more present than comfort.

My poms ache.

The sigils planted there are a grammar I do not yet speak, but they mark me like a teacher's

pen on the margin of a failed lesson.

The monastery bears the braid of frost up with a lawn its stones as God that will not

be warm again.

Some small seam of the cloister has been ruined.

My confession, what I write now, may not stop what I've said in motion.

It may only record it for a future reader, a pilgrim whose curiosity outstrips the caution.

I think of the thread that led me here, so small when first noticed, so a patient that

it might have been a trick of light.

I think of the ledger marks and the knowledge that tending is trade.

There is a ledger already open in my chest small, honest enters of the things I have named,

and the things I have held back.

Names I withheld because they might raise dormant things who promises I made to the dead

and to the living.

I'd understand now that every name recorded there was once the offer of a life in exchange

for a hush.

The monastery, once a place of shelter, has become a ledger mechanism to keep something

sleeping.

I'd hoped to be the last to write that hope now seems vanity.

In the late grey of afternoon, as the world beyond the cloister size into early evening,

I have the feeling that time itself keeps watch on my small acts.

Thanks muggies into frost on a page as if an invisible hand is erasing and writing with

a patience beyond my own.

The ledger itself seems to breathe with the candles appetite.

When I laid the pen down, my fingers carried the memory of cold like a brand.

I marked and heathered, not merely, by duty but by the sigils that are now part of my skin.

They will not be gone by morning.

The candle's hunger was patient, and it will be patient again.

This ledger will be read by others, and some will see only the frost to some will see

the names.

The act of recording is an invocation as much as any phrase the monk wants whispered.

There is a kind of mercy and confession not absolution, but the careful placing of

truth into a ledger so it may be found.

I do not know whether my entreat will save or dam another who follows the frost.

That ignorance is heavy and has edges that cut into the ordinary comforts of the refactory

of the warm breath, the humbleness of bread.

As stead as me is the small, brittle fact that some things can be named in the by measure,

even if measurement is a poor armor.

A measured name buys a small column piece of time a misfortune name can widen the seam.

Tonight the countless socket is empty, and a faint cold glow remains like the afterimage

of a star.

The ledger still writes itself in the margins of what I have left, and my hand will return

to more or to the same pitch to write another notch.

I try to imagine the ledger as a vessel rather than a trap that our attention can hold

back what sleeps rather than feeder.

It is a practice of hope thin as tissue and stubborn as the salt around our closeters.

It is possible, perhaps, that this is what stewardship has always meant, not shutting

doors forever, but learning the price of keeping them closed.

If there is a way to undo this, I do not yet know it.

There are rituals older than the monastery's stones, motions of unbinding that have been

taught in small half words so those who came before us.

The trouble is that to practice those rituals is to pay ransom and names, to commit attention

like offerings on a scale I can hardly conceive.

We are not saints set apart by caregivers of a debt.

We start with ledger and light between les that do not want to wake and a world that is

not prepared for workwakes.

I have tended and I have intended by the thing this requirement to be watched.