Carefully Exploring A New Way

Writing as prayer, as a way of passing time, as a way of seeing what one thinks. Our bird-filled valley, our Emily Dickinson hill, and our slow-rising sun. Waxing gibbous moon between flaming mare's tails, the gray in your hair and my tired old knees. Bluets are a way of deepening grief, of seeing the world from the perspective of hurt without needing to heal anything, because hurt, too, is a form of perfection. Please observe the way in which life requires no rehearsal, no manual, no direction, and you are it, you are the show, the whole splendid unfolding display. Free will is just a slightly more complex form of - a kind of code for, really - the natural, the inevitable yes. Or this: tell me of a time when you were not facing uncertainty. L. says when I dance my eyes close and I look like a man carefully exploring a new way his body moves. Many dead birds and not a few butchered quadrupeds attend. In what way is my capacity for sorrow distinct from my capacity for joy or are they the same space, the same sea in different lights? One never sees two moons at once, nor steps into a pair of rivers, yet when her shirt falls my breath catches, still. The neighbor's asparagus goes to seed, not wasted thereby, but one can't help thinking of certain recipes. How dark it must be in a closed book! "Christ those pigs reek." Planting trees is a way of thinking ahead, or seeming too, while trees themselves are a way of emphasizing one needn't travel to get where they're going. We are always loving forward. How tired one becomes of the religious imperative, its specialized language, its habit of insisting on precious. Making love has a lot of names, some more helpful than others, and nearly all of them contextual. Only when mowing do I wonder when this damn grass will stop growing. Waking early is a way of being alone, or of seeing the way in which one is always alone and yet - at the same time, in the same way - always one with the collective. Nobody joins me for coffee but near dusk we did gather at the meadow's far edge to talk about our relationship with the new acreage. Suddenly the path is a series of gentle slopes. A little goes a long way? Well, a little chipped paint can't obviate the wall. When I close my eyes I can still see. You too.