One Slips Into Bed Quietly

Gibbous moon at dusk floating over hay fields into which deer step both elegant and fearful. Clarity reveals what I have chosen to hide (usually with language), and the effect can hurt. Grasshoppers leap away, crickets sun themselves where the clover is thickest. Where waiting ends, joy begins.

In my journal of morning bird song - who sings first, who sings next, at what hour and from what direction, et cetera - the robin is strangely absent this year. Fences are always falling somewhere, and someone is always relieved. One slips into bed quietly so as not to wake her, yet not so quietly because she does awaken, and it's okay, it's more than okay. One appreciates the purple cow vetch, so reminiscent of papal entitlement in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

A monastic ideal impairs the otherwise available now. In summer, the twenty sentences are harder to write, but why. Even in July Bronson Brook is so cold my head hurts when I duck into its rapids. A bobcat crosses 143 near where the land slopes away north, and later walking and noting where moose have ripped greens away from bushes and trees, I wonder again at my obsession with bears, given the relative rarity of moose and bobcats.

One settles into it - it arises naturally - and thought recedes, being of little use in this new but thankfully familiar mode. On my feet for hours before microphones means my back aches, and so the dog and I walk farther than usual, despite her gathering slowness and own stumbling, because I have never mastered not testing myself against what I perceive as punishment. The old books don't work and I can't afford to buy any new ones. I assure you my inconsistency is neither intentional nor acquisitive, and any mysteries that result, however seemingly attractive, reflect nothing but my confusion about love.

Dogwood blossoms rot near the clothesline. We dress the trout where we catch them, lest the reek of guts and fish blood call predators too near the chicken shed. Tiny green blueberries emerge into sunlight on branches extending over crumbling walls framing Center Cemetery. Night yields surprisingly happy dreams from which I rise surprisingly open to service.