A Fruitful Dalliance

Of which I am one.

The cottage in the distance faced a mercurial future. We are in motion, all the time.

Or was it gazing upwards, counting stars, imagining reason that did us in? Gazelles leap over fallen trees and never arrive back on Earth. We misused our natural capacity for creation and now look.

Ah, but there are ways. Your letter arrived in early Spring and my heart - or what I call my heart - broke repeatedly, but also beautifully, as light is fractured by prisms. Don't call it a car accident and don't feel guilty. Later, circling the block and thinking about a cigarette, I recalled my one night in a convent, reading Thomas a Kempis by candlelight.

I would rather feel compunction than know its definition (he wrote). Yet one does collect books and read them and then go out before dawn, letting certain ideas gleaned from them lift one over the pine trees. Jesus is a busy man, what with healing us and all. These poems must do, as little else does.

Or else? In the morning, I return, and you are there and we are prone to comfort one another in ways that are themselves a comfort. Thus, repetition encourages the immortal perspective, a fruitful dalliance.

Though a day spent walking through museums - wondering what the world will look like when these works of art are no more, because being made of matter they are as doomed to dissolution as you and I - can be oddly pleasant, even reassuring. The hot dog vendor outside wanted to talk and so he did.

Or, all in all.