The Idea of You

Who burnishes affection for certain words has found the chapel beyond the cross. A green world blooming. One by one we ascended the spiral and found our way into the light. The kids report an American Woodcock and I go out later to check. Hours on the highway, signs for Tennessee. It rained in Saint Louis and I walked for hours thinking the idea of you. I remember being drunk in church singing "Be Not Afraid" and the priest looking at me, highly irritated which - as was my wont in those days - made me sing louder. A cardinal foul. A belt made of glistening stars coming off and on every time she speaks. How gorgeous, how graceful. Will not scripture allow abatement? We beg the sodden world and blessings erupt accordingly. He walked a long time with his hands swinging, recalling certain gallows, assuaging guilt with movement, all he had ever learned to do. Be my rose petal, be my grim receiver. Dust behind us and before us fields of glass across which we will crawl weeping, begging her to forgive us. Abraham Lincoln's hat, figure skaters wearing bow ties. My lips unfold and on them your name appears, kind of like a little cloud. A thousand grackles settle on the flowering dogwood tree and for no reason I think of cinnamon, as if the world were a kitchen, as if. Terror in a drum. We make arrangements and stick to them, considering the many folds of family.