Unfamiliar Wildflowers

A trail of ailments is no way to be needed, though one's pant legs do grow damp in the meadow while scouring for unfamiliar wildflowers. "Take me with you" only works if you believe there's somewhere to go. Turkey vultures are plentiful and yesterday a falcon took a mourning dove from the feeder, a sorrow only if one insists on taking sides, which hunger never does. Sooner or later, fertilizer, and sooner or later the nothing we cannot imagine, which is the everything we long for. Bibles burn the same way dictionaries do and summer beach reading as well. It's all fuel so far as the fire can tell. Bouquets fill the house, reducing patrimony to finding and cleaning any empty vessel. Cut stems encountered in odd places, batted there by cats. Her art is vivid and the only thing that quietens her, while the other daughter takes to her room to work on fiction that she no longer shares with me. The tape measure does nothing really, but it's probably a mistake to say that tools are neutral. One does cherish the diner-like coffee mug, myriad Mason jars, and certain ceramic candle holders made by old women in Greece just after the war. The world is not given to us multiple times in multiple ways but only once and this is sufficient to encounter the divine - the desired - stillness. On the other hand, it is nice to eat ice cream while watching television and think about what might happen when she comes to bed. It is not an error to consider the other, even to make the other the object of one's adoration and service, but it is still necessary to be alert to the "me" that roils below the surface, a deep tide of sacrifice and possessiveness that obfuscates our otherwise natural lovingkindness. The peonies lean and lean and one's study of support intensifies, one's gratitude for stakes and grounds in which to place them enunciates its boundlessness, and thus the lovelily blossoms continue their sunward, their lightward climb. Like that, kind of, and for now.