Lost in a Flood

The brook rises and all morning I long to sit beside it, dreams lost in muddy currents, but instead work patiently - well, mostly patiently - through the sentences of others. Ravens pass, and the wind, and thoughts come and go, none more real than the last.

J. brings some tomatoes by, and grocery bags filled with rainbow chard, and asks my opinion on how young is too young to help slaughter cows. Meanwhile, the past unfolds like a deer path in the forest, like an origami angel lost in a flood.

We pause by recently cut hay fields to watch turkeys bobbing in the distance. There is always something to see, but not always someone with whom to see it!

Counting the books stacked where I sleep she stops at one hundred, saying, "this isn't about reading but something else." Persuasion is one mode, acceptance another.

Two days later the front yard lilies have not recovered from torrential rains and so one resigns accordingly to this summer and no other. Before the mail there were only dreams, and before dreams, only the bland imperative of survival.

Tired and briefly alone, I rinse off the kayaks, wondering why anybody would bother reading Nietzsche more than once. Clouds bunch on the northern horizon like bruised roses or retracted gifts.

What we want precedes us, while what we accept forms a rear border. From time to time I consider letting the twenty sentences sift to nothingness, the way salt dissolves when sprinkled on the sea.

Parrots only mock what they can't possibly understand! Reheated coffee beckons a soft light.

Later, walking near twilight, L. pulls over to discuss what she calls "the limits of Buddhism in a mind structured by Catholicism" and though I walk for hours afterward I can't find the requisite - the familiar - interior silence. Working with stone pleases me, and always has, always in a way that is mysterious yet eminently solvable.

Notes for later amount to nothing to nobody's surprise. I fall asleep in afternoon only to wake more tired than usual.