Presentable Metaphors

We glimpsed swans on the road I chose, but the road I chose was still considered wrong. Circling Boston, clover-shaped off-ramps, and always the rain that never quite makes it to snow. We are blossoms, not machines.

Old people arguing about why young people don't go to church. She insists that come summer she'll still be able to drive  to Cape Cod and of course you know better than to underestimate her. Castration fantasies, Electra complexes, and a sense that knowing the way is not by itself sufficient.

We build our maps on other maps and with other maps: it is important to see this, lest we think we are a) alone or b) experts at cartography. In my head, David Gilmour solos, especially the second one in Comfortably Numb. It is not that everyone is lying but that everybody is telling the particular story that works for them, and who exactly are you to declare your story better?

I wake up late and write and the writing is hard, the morning sliding out from under me, my plans for the day dissembled. What does it mean to be related is similar to asked what does it mean to share narrative proximity. Snow glitters on the back porch roof, smooth and fine, and one admires it without insisting on presentable metaphors.

Yet all morning there was a pervasive sense that a way to bear witness to love was possible and already given, if only I could structure myself (locate myself?) in a way that would allow for its expression. We no longer argue but we are not at peace either. You learn a lot noticing who you are tempted to mock.

I don't have answers, only a cheerful willingness to give attention to whatever questions surface. Pausing where the road turns to study a flowing river where hours earlier seagulls had scavenged muddy flats. Deer with broken necks dumped unceremoniously off the highway.

I thus float in a dream of wellness, a honeysuckle blossom borne by rain gathered in a black bear's paw print, a wordy man whose wordy entanglements are brief visitations of vast ahistorical currents. Remember: there are teachers who arrive late and some who never arrive at all.