A Text One Cannot Traverse

A story I want to tell backfires. Or are the ghosts simply showing up another way? In my dreams, I stand beneath towering maple trees on College Street in Burlington Vermont, gaze through the green canopy at a small blue hole in the faraway sky and ask: why am I not living here. Eliot's misogyny, as if any of us should be surprised, and the sad compensations of late middle-age. The cross is not a lie unless you think it can make you do something you don't already want to do. A text one learns from, a text one cannot traverse, and a text one uses as a door stop. I wait quietly in the recently-dusted foyer for her to leave, enjoying the strange light of winter dawn, in no rush to be less angry or sad. Being the man who is torn between the desire to be the only one noticed and the desire to be eternally unnoticeable is not working out so well! My shoes are untied, my right arm is stiff from sawing lumber for birdhouses. Oh well, I say. Oh well, you agree, and raise up the sun, and make rivers flow to the sea.