The Mutterer Remembers

There are days I want to travel in order to go beyond all my broken dreams of arrival.

There are days when I am awfully lonesome, and days I cannot be the bell he wanted.

I hate how I love winter because of how tightly it closes down on you, the seam allowing no warmth or love to enter.

At 4 a.m. I stood beneath falling maple leaves, utterly spent from the effort of not allowing love to be love.

A cochineal encumbrance thusly rendered sacred?

Twenty sentences are not enough and - all too often - more than anybody needs.

Well, he did teach me how to make fires and how to always walk a little further than you think you can.

Last week I said to P. "I've never been blocked and I've never not had time to write" and now look.

Joy is uncountable, as lust is specificity gorging on itself.

And yet the mutterer remembers every angel's visit and recounts them often in prayers and song.

The red-tailed hawk waited for me on the guard rail, only leaping into the sky after I passed, as if to clarify who was frightening who . . .

I don't want to live forever, I know that my body already knows how to die, and I know that death is not the end, okay?

Envelopes come and go, you can find them under the table and at the end of the street and in certain motels in certain kinds of neighborhood.

Winterlessness?

Rural mailboxes leaning slightly west await the many letters I've been writing in her absence, their present emptiness a reminder of what bliss in reality is.

Yet another copy of Emily Dickinson's collected poems falling apart beneath my fingers, if you're wondering what to get me for Christmas.

Yesterday I drank wine while the chicken roasted, sitting on a little chair in the kitchen where it was warm, watching the sky which looked like rain, and wondering why I don't worry so much about finishing this or that writing project.

One accedes to photographs, one makes the sabbath vow.

There are many kinds of naked, of which I've cataloged more or less half, and did I mention that I'm free on Sunday?

There are worse things than nights that pass where you can't say what you did to deserve her, this woman who forgives what you can barely bring to light, who says when you're lost "go walking," and in whose antique glances the lamp you are just shines.