Toward Black Bears

Behind heavy curtains apprehension, yet one can say a great deal about cedar waxwings without invoking local poets or biology, and does. You don't "let go" of anything - you just see clearly that there isn't really a you, and - critically - nothing to hold in the first place. These hands on the keyboard are my only friend, all I trust, how they mediate the material world and what is thought. We incline toward black bears, their preference for solitude, love of food and sex, and strength masked by a general willingness to avoid conflict. Second thoughts all around! Also tall trees. Walking through the village last night, pondering apple blossoms and sunset and the flight patterns of swallows, wondering if now is when my inability to truly trust anyone will ruin me, and thinking too about Rockwell again, who resolved his dilemma in a way I have yet to precisely articulate. Why resent safety? Who finds grace in longing? The absent object blesses us yet again. He does not say much anymore about his pipe, and we are long past discussing the many dead animals we buried and/or killed. The obscurity we fear is home and nobody need measure any drapes or lock any door. Plans are being made for Ascutney, for the sea over yonder, and one is borne on them through time, is carried just so, or is there just this flow as so long ago suspected. A child insisting on this and not that mode of prayer. Coffee, descents unlabeled, a quiet house in which one falls in love all over again. Can we see what happens? Say it's a secret? All these books reading me in the light you are. Again. And again. And always.