The Way to Jerusalem is Long

If an apple could become fully aware it would say, "I am what the tree is doing." Question Euclid carefully but wait until after high school to do it (I say from experience). The dog perches on Chrisoula's sewing table, studying the neighborhood, which at this hour is filled with robins, dandelions, rabbits, lilac and forsythia. Such lovely patterns in which to be so enfolded, yes? As in yet another sentence, yet another dream.

One seeks what matters and finds instead a series of habits, mostly unobserved. I did encounter God in Auriesville, New York but didn't see that fact until months later. Chopin's nocturnes are sorrow encoded in technical expertise repeating now. The bluets grow in a rough line extending south to north, not reaching the back yard, and not expanding east to west until closer to the road. You are life playing at learning it is life!

One recalls also a meeting with four camels on a mountain top a few miles south of the Vermont border. Dirt roads in hottest summer above which azure butterflies trace invisible circles. We are hunger organized, desire embodied? When she bends over me, hair falling, mouth opening, I do not think of eagles. Well, there are many donkeys, and the way to Jerusalem is long enough to allow for changes of mind.

Be my mustard seed and I will be your dented accordion. The woman - Kateri I believe - played fiddle (Appalachian hymns to scarcity) at the fair, eyes closed, swaying in a way that suggested a center of balance not located in her body and I watched her while drinking black coffee and working out the history of my relationship to whiskey. What the lilac does is not prayer but then why say that, that way? Sushi remains the one meal I cannot prepare, or prepare only poorly, though the ones who eat it say otherwise. There is no "you" where "I" am, only bears tearing through bags of grain set aside for turkeys and chickens.