A Restrained Yes

The twenty mile walks begin to add up, like turkey vultures hunkering in summer's yet-green maples, and people ask: what are you doing exactly?

I keep forgetting to put the lovely bobolinks in the twenty sentences!

One begins to understand at last the possessive nature of the image: what it demands of those who covet it: and faces again the terror formerly called unbearable.

Jugs of wine at midnight mean laughing alone at stars winging slowly north to south, kind of like pinwheels, kind of like a disco.

How sweet forgiveness tastes when one no longer makes it conditional on this or that kiss!

The red-tailed hawk passes in a fierce descending arc heading roughly west, and we stop walking to watch it disappear into the hollow.

My uncle who did not die but lived on the beach in Normandy that awful day, why was he drunk four straight decades after, and why did he make us all laugh so hard and why am I asking these questions now?

The little while you held my heart in your cupped palms was like riding a horse through low tides on the southern coast of Ireland, sun setting, in the days before electricity.

I am saying that what works may not always work and so you have to be ready to dance in unexpected ways.

Wordiness passes, as day passes, as certain women pass, and I intuit again the silence I have so long feared to leave unbroken.

One cannot seriously consider Sappho without seeing that something has been lost (and I am not talking here about the balance of her lines).

Poetry is an emergent quality of those bent on God, broadly defined.

"You are so attached to being wounded, it's like there's nothing else left to you."

Near dawn I wake and stumble outside to pray, pissing on what remains of the tiger lilies, and telling the neighbor's dog "it's okay, it's okay" in the quiet voice I taught myself to offer all dogs.

I offered to cross the river to pick  morning glories for her, but she said no because "there are only one or two left."

I prayed for sleep - got sleep - and dreamed of a glass coffin sliding down hill towards a muddy river named after my dead uncle.

My beautiful sisters all watching from a distance, as if propriety matters in days and nights like these!

All morning walking through three towns, brain repeating "What is love/baby don't hurt me/don't hurt me/no more."

I know we said no but would you consider a sacred, a restrained yes?

Yours, your light, Emily.