Shoveling Ash Into the Garden

Oh how blue the stars are just before three a.m., and how lovely the sound of the cold wet grass of the fields through which you walk with the dog not talking.

Be attentive to what calls on your attention, and allow it to speak to you in the language it chooses.

A little moonlight through curtains, a little shiver between blankets.

And her shoulder, and the way she smiles when you enter the room, and the sound her shirt makes as it falls to the floor.

The brook rushes through darkness with no consideration for who owns the land.

Writing so flush you forget to drink your coffee and it goes cold and you reheat it, staring out the window, emptied of sentences which is always the only real joy.

Oh and also how hungry some kisses are, suggesting that sometimes our real desire is to utterly consume - to bring to conflagration - the other.

And epistles and the last of the bull thistle and little kids learning to whistle.

My uncle's cane, my father's watch and my mother's bible, all on the bedroom credenza, along with a chunky zafu, a folded pink quilt, thirty-seven books (really!), Chrisoula's latest knitting project, a cheap telescope I bought twenty some odd years ago, a chunk of amethyst - formerly known as my "writing stone" - and a dozen or so pieces of quartz collected from three different locations in Worthington.

All writing is subsequent to what internal impulse?

Note to self: reread Gertrude Stein and buy socks and advocate for the legalization of marijuana.

The man without shoes has always owned shoes in the way that silence and soap are not unrelated.

Landscape is a text is fun to say - and not an unhelpful way to think - but don't make an argument out of it, don't try to force it on anyone.

The axe requires attentiveness differently than chainsaws but that's not the reason I use it: it has to do with what is yielded up in process.

One way to think about anything is this: will it disturb a chickadee?

How east I am, how north!

It appears I'm sleeping in beds again - not just tossing in them until she falls asleep, or making love on them, or (more often) just ignoring them altogether.

Slow is better - while kissing is better - and whispering oh and after bringing her tea and a book.

How happy trees make me, and how I love firewood too, and always have, and also shoveling ash into the garden after, scattering it over the snow, and seeing clearly - not as a matter of mystery - the way this enfolds that becoming this.

If you want to give me anything, give yourself the gift of waking early enough to see how blue the sky is just before the sun rises because that blue is God, that blue is our home together.