A Dog's Way of Loving

I am given now to the end of secrets: the form of anything is that which I can accept without embellishment or hiding.

At 4 a.m. one's limitations are simply leaves falling, or the sound of rain against the windows, or the twentieth sentence moved to a new location.

I walk slowly down the dirt road, stopping to listen to leaves falling and the soft rain which - how do I know these things, yet I do - will intensify before I get home.

A dog's way of seeing, a dog's way of loving?

You see, what is true is beyond the self - is the space in which the self plays out, like ripples on a lake's surface at midnight when you are still asleep ashore and dreaming.

And it stopped me - how she called me "honey" - the kids laughing at my stunned look - and I nearly dropped the pickles - yet my heart moved and perceived again the vastness in which love is that which accepts without condition or qualification (without specialness) all of us.

It is possible one cannot say thank you enough to Emily Dickinson, though staring dreamily into the night sky when the others are asleep does suggest a sufficiency of gratitude might one day be discovered.

Order is more helpful than drama now and - paradoxically - dissembling rather than narrating.

How often my silences are misinterpreted, as if the wordy are somehow bound to a degree of chatter unbecoming a disciple of chickadees!

He did wonder where she was in her cycles, hoping as always for that one walk in which the last of the foliage signifies no-death-in-dying in the fulsome rays of the Hunter's moon.

Note to self: consider a monograph on the psychical intersection of lycanthropy and menses.

Drunk on the lake, whispering while we kissed because you said sound travels which - were my head not always up my ass around women - I might have figured out was a sign.

And my son goes a step beyond: starting fires with flint and steel.

Cheap wine is all I can afford these days (oh whiskey how I miss you), drinking it from a mason jar while the others are asleep, fumbling as always through my sentences.

I look okay naked but let's face it: forty-seven is forty-seven.

S.'s photographs are informed by her gift for attentiveness, which she can only talk about slant, which is a hard way to live but in the end the only joy.

I woke up thinking of the story we tell about him - the container we all make for him - and saw at last it was our own narrative projected in order that we might ignore its constraint, and so stepped quickly out the back door - shivering in the 3 a.m. rain - that I might not forget: me too, me too.

Crows have always kept an eye on me, which is no compliment.

Don't forget that the interfold between personal and public is unavoidable, especially for idiots masquerading as monks.

For I left my boots in the rain but it's okay, it's more than okay, because the journey is over, the man without shoes married a cobbler!