Dust Resigned to Trying Again

The hummingbird rests briefly in the apple tree above my head, a dark blur because my glasses have fallen to the grass, and I can't be bothered to reach for them.

The morning glories we planted are sprouting, as are the gourds, and the beans that we worried were taking too long.

Sol intensifies according to the earth's rotation, and one sweats digging bricks out beyond the thimbleberry patch.

A mourning dove mistaken for a rabbit, and the neighbor's cat worrying a squirrel and, as dusk comes on and the moon turns slowly from chalk to polished bone, swallows.

The doctor will not meet my eyes which doesn't bother me but on the other hand, what purpose does this sentence serve?

Many trees die in this narrow valley, three on land for which I am responsible.

A previous owner made wooden bowls by hand and from time to time in my spading I turn one up, dust it off, and stack it over by the duck pen.

There are Buddhas everywhere if you look.

The tarot book lent to Jason appears mysteriously in a previously-unpacked crate, along with half a dozen Hayden Carruth collections long since reassigned to the dimmest of dim memory banks.

In darkness before she wipes her lips I kiss them, deeply, gratefully.

The apartment across from the homeless shelter appears now in dreams, a clear presentation of the monastic oblivion through which I stumbled before drifting off to law school and marriage.

Sophia used to call it a "hossible," which made me happy, the way it rhymed with "possible," and yet she didn't like it when I smiled upon hearing her say it that way, because she knew it was supposed to be "hospital," which has no useful rhymes.

How many weeks since I cracked Emily Dickinson?

On the other hand, rereading "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" for the first time in three or four years, and making others read it, too, which is within my power and what is this but a benevolent application?

The calendar will eat you alive, spit our your bones, and the clock will pick at them until nothing remains but dust resigned to trying again.

The new mode fails me, which angers me, which is okay!

I tend to cry at night before Chrisoula comes to bed, quietly so as not to wake the kids.

It doesn't need to be hot or even close to hot for a fan to comfort me, which is why I call them all "Mama" which makes everyone laugh but between you and me, I'm kind of not joking.

Francis Bacon worried that "learned times have been inclined to atheism" which tended to impair the collective's "dependence on God," to which one can only say, religious whiners of the seventeenth century hadn't seen nothing.

Yet from the chemical perspective, all life is a unit.