After Stargazing

My new office is the old hayloft, my new coaster a chunk of marble countertop dug from the trash pit unexpectedly discovered out back. Every generation has a different idea of what is necessary, what is dispensable, that's what time is for. The middle ground asks me to stay, to make no demands of it, and to give it away, no matter how confused the giving makes me. North means intimacy, north is okay.

We are working on the gutters now, and on the stairs rotting away after decades of rain. I am often translated literally, which is a mistake, since believe me, even I don't know what I'm saying half the time. The coffee was bitter, but that's what coffee is, or is it just that at a young age my parents taught me certain values? We call this low-resolution simulation home but it's not, it's what's already passed by our home.

Can thought go backwards - not think about the past but actually go backwards - or is it too subject to entropy? Michael argued there is no such thing as front or back, only spacious awareness, position-less awareness, to which I always responded, okay yes but it seems there is and, Wallace Stevens and his ice cream notwithstanding, "seems" is the show, "seems" is what we've got. Well, I am happiest when sex is a shared meeting beginning and ending in - gently annotated by - kisses. Jas talks about his pending vasectomy and halfway through says, you're the first guy I've talked to who hasn't cracked a joke, to which I respond, I never joke about penises, and Jas says, men who can't joke about dick don't have a lot of dick to joke about.

Those dreams of anger wake me still and I sit up in bed, listening to the neighbor's window fan, and wondering what has happened to make me so casual about moonlight. The letters come and go, coming and going comes and goes, and - oh hell, you know the drill. She bought me a coffee and even though it wasn't what I wanted, I drank it, and even though I'm tired of this kind of dialogue, we walked in a big loping circle around Northampton, talking about marriage and raising families and how exhausting it is to love the word "Christ." One feels threatened by certain biographies, yields, is brought to heel accordingly.

He said my lips were too thin for anyone to want to kiss, it'd be like making out with a pencil, but what can you do, the body you've got is the body you've got to both love with and let be loved. I stay awake after, stargazing, happy in a non-specific way. A little before six a.m. the ducks begin their guttural quacking, hungry and aware of the light, not unlike you-know-who. My new office is the old hayloft, I write beneath narrow wooden beams sparrows once rested on, and dust motes still drift through the familiar sunbeam, me.