"Triptych" - Jacob Ehrlich
I.
I know the storm is coming. My pale face – white, numb – feels it, pressed cold against the window, looking out with wide eyes. the glass is cracked and the gusts are rustling, I know it is not my old wife’s creaking rocker I hear no, for she is dead – croaked – and I’m alone listening to this windmill’s buckling bones shake & moan before the coming storm. these achey bones have been here before & known this trembling all too well – but old machines like us don’t think about escape, but just continue to grind and grind into dust come Heaven or Hell. poor barren bodies shake, worry, whimper beneath these heavy loads gasping: “Maker oh Maker WHY have you forsaken us?” and the answer comes with the ocean swell, and a clap of thunder that chills the spine and beckons silence. the rain has begun & I will be lucky if I make it through the night, knowing that the tides are so high and that the roof is about to get blown clean off.
II. Have you ever felt the agony of being trapped, caught up in hell-fire, stuck in the shackles of deep diabolic sleep, a prisoner of your own feverish consciousness? Alone out in the Great Beyond, where the demon winds howl and roar and there is no comfort, all men are tortured Sisyphuses pushing more than their karmic weight of sin to the delight of heavenly tormentors. It is anguish, it is fire and it is no progress, these odious wheels, horrible cycles and ruts that keep legions of the somewhat innocent occupied, bound and chained. There is no space for movement, no thoughts for freedom and no hope, it is only the brilliantly constructed sinister labyrinth, inescapable ever-churning devil machinery: paranoia, accusations, curses, fears, trembling fright, the kind that could cause a man to kill his brother or beat his wife. I know, for I have worn those thorny chains: I have watched the prick of a finger, an off-hand slight, beget the word “murder,” I have cursed all those I’ve loved and offered blood to any god who would give me power, I tried to make the noose around my own heart tighter in hopes it’d make my boulder lighter. And the demons laughed for centuries, and we all loosed our screams, but one morning, the cacophony stopped. The mountain sank and the boulders stood still & I woke up, in a pool of sweat, spent, with blood on my hands and a mark on my brow.
It was just before sunrise. The air was dank and humid. I took a deep breath, bowed my head, and prayed for rain.
III.
The late morning sun shone down on flooded land, reflecting itself endlessly in beads of dew. The gentle breeze caressed the trees and stroked the waters as they mewed. I opened the battened hatch, and squinted at the light: no storms no more, I remarked. I saw the flitting of a dove and felt the refreshing radiance of the golden sun. No sounds to be heard but the dove’s soft chirping, and the quiet hum of my lover’s snores. I opened my eyes and stretched my arms upwards, looking out at the greenery, the peace of everything being in its place: The waters purring low, sun on high, a rainbow arced to frame the sky.
Nothing to do but freely breathe & freely die.