Another Ripple

Angel faces fall on me, turtles lie crushed on the hardtop, and crow feathers sift down from rainy skies. A thousand buttercups remind me sunlight is neither cruel nor benevolent. We are all museums.

We are all lurching through time like popsicle sticks in a hurricane. She fell asleep against me so I studied the green yard and the bronze light beyond it. Dogs are the interior seam through which guilt and fear most spill.

Tin siding banging all night on the barn, until one understands it is a voice from the past begging forgiveness, asking attention. The dust rises whenever we kneel to write our names in it, doesn't it? Daisy this, daisy that.

Bring order to what is presently disordered and peace will come forward, it will elide. One's pockets disgorge pennies and cabbage seeds and gray lint strewn with strands of red. Throwing away untried recipes is a form of apocalypse.

On the other hand, I never made a single dish you didn't eat and claim to love. My father spent seminal years in a seminary. Last night Emily Dickinson drove with me in a car outside Northampton and we agreed I don't yet understand solitude.

When I unravel, she spools me, and last night she cooked a steak with ginger and soy sauce and we at it together watch reruns of 1980's sitcoms. Old men admire me when I fish, in particular my skills at casting. Perception is interpretation.

The red bird comes to me in dreams, hungry and tired, and I minister to it accordingly it. Oh for another ripple, oh for another star.