Given My Knees

M. suggests that nobody has ever seen moonlight, which is technically true - or you can see it that way - but also kind of perverse, like baking cupcakes and not sharing them with anyone. Before the storm, swallows cross the slippery gray sky, and robins hop between dandelions to the maple tree where a feeder hangs that last summer was broken albeit not permanently by a black bear we all watched from the bedroom window at 2 a.m. or so and still talk about, a family. What the mower misses lives a little longer, gazing across a leveled landscape at a torn seam in the horizon where the reaper both enters and departs, "the widow's door" my aunt once called it. Replanted ferns are not averse to shade while chives just make it work wherever you put them, like hippies or certain kinds of Christians. Mostly when we are in motion it is because some appetite moved us that way - wanting to sleep with someone or see what's on the far side of a hill or eat apple slices spread with peanut butter & c. Perhaps ignorance is an excuse. Well, distinguish between the appetite and the narrative by which we justify it and thusly see the way the world is merely - is lovelily - passing by. When the spirit says dance, put on the White Album, eat a few tabs of acid and see what your feet want from the rest of you. At the top of the familiar Monadanock, windblown and sore, it occurs to me I haven't taken a step without Chrisoula in twenty some odd years and I keep touching her as we go down, sometimes for balance given my knees, but mostly in gratitude. That which is not unwelcome is not by definition necessary. Because I am not ready for him to die, I work all day in the garden, reinvigorating dormant soil with a third generation cultivator, the smooth wood of its handle at home in my grip like nothing else before or since. What the Lord giveth, the Lord taketh, but two can playeth at that game. Afternoon breezes moving curtains while I try to focus on my reading, idly checking email, and reaching - blindly still, but not unhappily - for the new mode of writing. Fertile grounds beckon, the sourdough starter eclipses a vessel's rim. Forever salted, forever yes but not the way we thought. Oh dear. When I say October, you say?