It’s always tempting to offer some borrowed eloquence; but that’s cheating, and now that I’ve lived officially three quarters of a century I’d like at least to cheat a little less than in former years. No intimation of winter yet—the season hangs indifferent, damp as the leaves in my back yard that I’ve not yet raked, neither cold enough for winter nor fruitful enough for fall. The sap wrung out of the time, I journey a sodden way towards solstice, towards the longest night.

Some years the sky has opened to thousand Seraphim striding the air, their great pennons shedding dark love. Today at dusk a fat squirrel pawed through the leaves, found an acorn and scampered up the fence to the garage roof and thence to the hanging branches of the huge old oak in my neighbor’s yard three houses down. Better bury some acorns in the ground, I thought, lay down some supplies against the time when the light goes; though yesterday at the clinic smart young doctors shined lights in my eyes and pronounced them healthy.

Lord, the thing I know best is that I don’t know much of anything. I can’t imagine not being, can’t think not thinking. But the death wind blows around me, not urgently, not swiftly, but firmly nonetheless. What angels will stride in its wake this year? I read of murdered children in the news and wonder how anyone . . . so many innocent, but would fewer have been less . . . I can’t finish the sentence. I resolve to rake my leaves before year’s end (mine by possession, not by ownership), to clean my gutters, and to sit on my back porch at dusk to watch the time go afterwards.

These will be my last things for the time being—though of course I have good memories, hierophanies some of them and those I don’t like to use too much, don’t want to wear them thin. But if you come by again, I’ll be as ready as I can be, having recalled that once you astonished me in the old red brick church, so that I ran out into the night with tears streaming down my face. After that you dropped in occasionally, like that time in the Intimate Bookshop when I picked up “A Song for Simeon.” But mostly you’ve stayed hidden in the world, the “still unspeaking and unspoken word” I wait upon.

—Come, Emmanuel.