You Can Find Jesus Anywhere

I lose count of the hawkweed blossoms and it's okay. Milk snakes unfurl like a monk's belt and near the cemetery summer's first toad scuttles the trail for rotting logs. Eighteen fifty was a hard year, fifty-one harder.

Tea while the chickens do their egg song and I write. What else is morning for? Clarity is a form of responsibility and at last one is ready to accept it.

Viceroy butterflies sun themselves near the garden, folding and unfolding in the stiff light until at last they rise and flutter west. Robin's egg fragments litter the lawn and God is near accordingly. I mean holiness pervades the whole of creation and I notice it sometimes and others I don't.

Oh beautiful cirrus clouds you are moving like well-trained draft horses, you are layering the moon in veils. Jeremiah and I discuss the feeding habits of bass which is to say we are strategizing, and getting near the hunt. If you can find Jesus in Frank O'Hara's poetry - and you can - you can find Jesus anywhere.

On the other hand, D.'s apartment in Burlington, eating cantelope after midnight on a ragged futon, nowhere near the end of the futility inherent in language. Spindly marigolds, a handful of violets. One waits on the mail and at last it arrives and all it ever brings is yet another night of wondering what tomorrow's mail will bring.

Despite all evidence to the contrary, I continue to believe - and to act as if - I can think my way to happiness. Honeysuckle blooms, buttercups, turtles navigating difficult roads. Near the old bridge, a clutch of poison ivy, and in the forest moose tracks, which at times one feels they would follow into Vermont.

Trout, tomatoes, pickles and basil wrapped in dough wrapped in foil and baked in coals while the sun sets. There never was enough whiskey for the thirst I pretended to be.