Only What Always Is

Perhaps the question is how sad one can be before sadness itself passes and you arrive at what remains which is always only what always is. It's like we met just to learn we would never meet and so began a terrible lesson in emptiness. On the other hand, a field full of hawkweed under towering cumuli backlit by sunlight does make one dream of a westward turn. What I am saying is, don't give up, not just yet.

You were born so that I might find a use for mailboxes in poems, and I was born so that you might at last sidestep guilt in favor of writing at all. In my dream I show you the pasture, talking and talking, and you bring me to silence with a soft touch and we lean into a first kiss where the fence itself is toppling, at last falling into the tall grass while overhead a pale moon turns somersaults through glowing pines. Alone is a choice we make in order to more deeply perceive the one who chooses at all. How blunt I feel when asked again to dig a grave that another might grieve beside it.

I wonder if she remembers the vigil she held when I asked timidly would she? How much love can we bear? And just how specific must one be about anything at this point? I am unmoved by past lives, understanding now that it all happens at once.

In other words, this. Another fox attack, this one just before midnight, the chicken's confused cries fading as it was carried away through the fields. Oh heart or whatever breaks can you not bear me away beyond words, even for only a moment? Modesty becomes no body although context remains germane.

A vivid balance in which resistance at last ends. Before red I swallow yes. Be at last my heavenly guest? I carry the thought of her deep into the forest, and the forest changes accordingly, and in a thousand years someone will pass here - pause by where the trillium grows - and praise the sunset, the red west of loveliness blooming, and know they are home in all places.