Along the Warm Ridge

Some roads are longer than others. Some paths. And at night the moon seems to move slowly through certain swathes of sky, while you can imagine the stars singing sad songs like those from France in the early twentieth century. Each note lasts at least a thousand years. Maybe you can't ask a bird to leave a bread crumb alone - and sooner or later we all have to sleep in an unfamiliar clearing, blankets covered in frost. There are lonelinesses I still ask for, and women who provide them, as surely as cardinals are sure of red. Well, we are all trying, or so I tell myself at 3 a.m., studying drifts of snow in faint-and-growing-fainter moonlight. How tired I am of my inclination to praise, and how tired I am of pretending to be interested in what has never held my attention, and how tired I am of pretending anyone is broken. Travelers come and go across the exterior landscape while we rest in God. Can I say it that way and mean it? At last? Coming in later for tea, sitting with the dog by a south-facing window. It's never about us only, is perhaps the hardest lesson to learn. How happy I am - briefly - to be alone in the dark, my fingers trailing slowly along the warm ridge of her spine.