THOUGHTS It is difficult, writing this: the failings of our languages, music possibly excepted, to convey thoughts and impressions birthed in some vast heart of hearts beyond boundary and register, thoughts and impressions that yield no form in this world of ours, that yet hold sway. Each day for thirteen months I enjoyed the singular fortune of spending many hours with Rosemary. Rich times. Her consonance and constancy. Her approvals. Her touchings. And those eyes into which I looked so often, eyes deep with fancy and flitting ardor, eyes in which I saw finery not of human hands, eyes that sometimes reflected naught yet harbored profound understandings or held memories of boundless dominion or visions of untethered favor. And I read to her. So many words! Her duplications – not so much of the words themselves, their individual meanings, their apparent concepts, but rather of their inward truths and untruths, their outward profound revealings. Nestling in those revealings, she would sigh as if she breathed a higher air. And I cradled her, each time that delicate figure ever slightly more frail. And we would talk and oftentimes did not talk; and we would smile and sometimes did not smile; and we clasped, the urgency and insistence of it, and we mused and dreamt, hushed – I of her, she of me, we of family and those others we treasure, and even of those whose names we would never learn. Rosemary remained remarkable. Emotionally and mentally, spiritually and aesthetically, she was ever unencumbered by physical distresses; her senses of humor and of irony never waned, her senses of the sublime and of the absurd never withered, neither did her willingness and ability to recognize and admire beauty, nor the kindness with which she regarded others, nor the tenderness that radiated from that softly beating velvet heart. This, my friends, was the fulcrum of my livingness for those days and months – imagine my wealth. May I tell you one last thing: the moment she released her body is, for me, un-erasable. It is without time, without form, without effort, without movement. I witnessed pure thought and it is the most beautiful thing I shall ever see. And the sky, moteless, reaches past the sun.