Made of Merely Snares

In the morning I wake before anyone, pour yesterday's coffee from mason jar to pot, gaze into the far field while it reheats, and then take my mug - the one I bought ten years ago at Snow Farm, when you and I had money still - out back, walking slowly in a widening circle to take note of the brightening (the disheartening?) foliage.

It can seem as if we are waiting for the mail, it can seem like the next letter is the one.

Driving to teach yesterday P. and I passed two flocks of turkeys - how lovely their brass-colored feathers are when the early morning sun alights on them - and said nothing.

And we see what winter will bring, and we prepare for it, and it is enough, it is more than enough, because what else can we do?

And stars visible through threads of cloud drifting slowly west to east, and the red hint of hell in some of Max Ernst's work.

Your fingers press on my shoulders easing me down, a trail of kisses in darkness to where you are softest.

Nuthatch feathers by the back fence, three of them nearly lost in the tall grass, and all at once I saw the lovelessness of clocks, saw my face in the sky smiling back.

A bowl of apples, a doll house my grandfather built, half a dozen or so finger puppets, the dreamcatcher Chrisoula bought in Washington before we met, and a cookie cutter - heart-shaped - the cats have been batting around.

The little brook comes out of the marsh and late fall sunlight flickers where the water falls down mossy rocks where in summer we watched as a crow tore a crayfish into three, maybe four, meaty pieces.

Pancakes with grated pear, bread with warm cheese, and later yet pork kabobs, the meat dressed with lemon juice, olive oil and oregano.

At one a.m. or just after I go back outside a last time, the dog tired and unsure - how our bodies guide us as we age - and we listen to the wind a while, then go inside to sleep.

I wonder sometimes what sentence might most move you, and whether language might ever not be made of merely snares.

Fall moths in fluttering congregation at the porch and overhead bats, their broad arcs broken by sudden dives, the living dusk - the emergent twilight - a singular whole.

The pile of backyard deadfall grows ever higher and wider and so we begin to plan: what we will roast when at last we light it, who will sleep outside beside the slow-diminishing flames, whether we will drink whiskey or wine, and what else - if anything - might require conflagration.

What do we mean when we say "I want what I want?"

The wind does not come from anywhere, it does not go anywhere, and yet.

One morning you wake up and the cardinal is gone -the red bird of your heart is gone - and you must choose how to respond and this is what it means to live.

Hours given to composition - the words arranged first this way then that - so what was formerly called the self - which is merely that which is set apart - becomes instead the flux, becomes instead the circle whose circumference extends eternally.

Prayer is relationship, as song is a kind of staircase, both deconstructing the origins of internalized structure, the foolishness of spatial and temporal limits, especially with regard to thought.

And a door will open, and you will pass through, and what you discover there will not be unfamiliar, it will not be not your home, and I will be there too, waiting, my arms open, winterless with joy.