When Isn't August A Love Note

(i)

I remember waking to chicken feet scattered through dewy grass, and I remember long nights of howls that even now haven't ended. What is the purpose of psychological pain? Who doesn't want the address of the interior Cartesian Theater so they can burn the damn thing down? The chickens did not willfully climb into the coyote's waiting teeth and whatever the moon wants, it does not want for canine wails. This is for those of us who leaned on the window sill praying, who knew that life was utterly neutral, and that neutral was as close to fair as anyone with an imaginal soul could get.

(ii)

Well, the lilies are mostly gone and we are nearly ready to bathe ourselves in the streaming light of the Perseids. May all beings be safe and happy, preferably snuggling on back yard blankets under skies of trailing fire! When isn't August a love note from the one who sees us through winter? Tractors pulling hay wagons back slowly into the barn, and we set up the radio to listen to the Red Sox while sitting on the back porch. Moths flutter around the Coleman lantern, a reminder we have entered that stage where you no longer need to touch to touch. And down by the horses, the kids' voices float through the dusk like strings of holiday light. Perhaps it is the stars who gaze at us and not the other way around after all.

(iii)

In the hay loft at night, thin bands of moonlight extend across part of the floor, and you sit quietly pretending not to notice them. Was it always like this to fall in love? To notice beauty, to long to possess beauty, and then to let beauty pass because what else is possible in the world of coming-and-going? All that persists is the reference point, by which all else is made relative. Or something like that.

(iv)

There was an enormous quartz rock in the pasture and when the sun was just so in the sky the glassy stone would light up with shimmering rainbows, lovelier than church and more stable than any breathing. Later there were words, and later yet, sentences, but even now the vast interior library is simply a record of what light insists is possible. What can be said has been said a thousand times but even the author of Ecclesiastes found a reason to say it again. This is for those who study, who leave home to become students, and who eventually disappear while seeking increasingly obscure - but not unfructive - texts.

(v)

Chrisoula knows I am writing and brings me coffee - black with a little stevia - in the hand-made mug I bought for her at the Snow Farm seconds sale two, maybe three Christmases past. Briefly I set aside the world - which is this writing, this way - to say thank you: thank you: thank you.