After Yes

A sinking feeling lately that there is neither beginning nor end, mostly in the sense that one climbs a mountain only to discover the one who arrives at the windy peak is the same one who left the drizzly base camp. In my dream Chrisoula is knitting a sock and says casually "well, what did you expect?" Or was that this morning over tea? Yes, it was this morning over tea except I was drinking coffee, or trying to. You will nail me to that cross or I will nail myself damn it! Pronouns beg the question and are no real help in getting to the answer. Resurrected butterflies abound. Lately too a sense of being tortured by images (see preceding sentence or just get naked and face a mirror), largely without consent or - perhaps better to say - wanting to withdraw consent but not knowing how. How confused one can become after "yes!" You think you're a something - anything - a self with a pedigree and a multi-volume narrative still being composed maybe - and it's that at which you grasp or try not to grasp, when in fact peace is simply clarity with respect to the fact that there is no thinker thinking anything so grasping or not grasping never enters into it. The truth is I'm fixing a tractor for my dead drunk uncles. All morning in an icy rain shoring up the north foundation getting angrier by the second. The truth is, words fail me but I keep thinking it's the other way around and so I go on with the guilt, go on thinking "just one more poem, just one more sentence." I mean look: the limbs of the old dogwood tree are heavy with ice and reach for the ground, uttering the perennial "enough." The truth is, I wish I was the one who opened, who allowed their love to enter, whose folds were the ground in which the wanderer came home.

I am blind
in the bright tent
our bodies make

Take my hand
so we can enter
what opens

together