Quieter on Arrival

Not a blue morning, but one where the birds are slower to the feeder, and quieter on arrival. A long walk back to the house where we make love, "forbidden love" as they called it prior to the realization (the acceptance) that sex isn't a procreative function owned by marriage but a spiritual exercise, a means by which the collective both knows and remembers - literally re-members - itself. Those curtains aren't going to open themselves! Everything is matter (from the Latin mater, or mother) and subject to time (traditionally embodied as male, i.e., "Father Time"). We never talk about your menstrual cycles, nor whether you nursed your children, and all the other ways your body becomes you. I can't tell what undoes the self quicker: religion, which I have been gulping for nigh on four decades, or science, which I read last night in bed. Tea bags, onion skins, garlic bits, cherry pits - all of it goes in the worm bins - and comes back soil. Terri compliments my linen pants to which I respond, "one is never out of fashion at Goodwill." Repetition signifies meaning, or intention at least, or maybe we are only just now learning how to count. Such a sensitive throat! In my dreams I give birth to birds then walk through rainy streets to the apartment by the homeless shelter where the work began and the loneliness. We finish clearing logs, move on to bricks half-buried in the thimbleberry bushes. The bluets are gone, a consequence of letting parts of the meadow return to meadow, yet what is the function of this sentence? People laugh when I relocate milkweed, building a good-sized swath of it near the tansies, but I'm in it for the monarch butterflies, and always have been so, you know, fuck 'em. One perfects a certain smile, a certain know-it-all style as a means of deflecting attention. Else what are these illusions for? "Do me," she whispered, aiming for sexy but the phrasing intrigued me and I stopped and began working it out, who was doing who and how and the relative nature of pronouns in a coital context and then she said "oh for Christ's sake fuck me" and that was different, there was nothing to learn, it was just matter mattering in an exquisite way. Apparently we are subject to moonlight, hints of wings, and the everpresent emptiness that can only be filled - is always already filled - by itself. Yet nothing comes off, nothing opens, and nobody enters anybody. Oh morning, was this what you lit upon my hands for? This this?