Unworkable Recipes

Between all bees and flowers, and the pesticides killing them dead, and the futility of private love which is at last revealed to us - through us - what last poem or sequence of poems shall I write?

We who were undone in shadows. We who were made whole by admitting the shadows undid us, which was a simple utterance and not a war against shadows.

This public heart, this wide-open blossom, this not-forbidden photograph.

We who helped ourselves to sugar, forgetting we had been asked to cull the unworkable recipes.

We who mistook promise for a secret.

After a storm comes the sun but why do we think it is storms that are aberrational?

Daughters break ice on the horse trough with heavy mallets, timing their blows in concert, and the horses are watered accordingly. Juncos and wrens are not chickadees and "not chickadees" is a kind penance.

Sinners a kind of messenger.

Between the many prisms and rosaries - between reading what I write and studiously not reading what I write - what remains that is love?

The void that is a body these hands cannot touch.

The obsession that longs to colonize landscapes that cannot be colonized but only glimpsed and then hinted at.

For you Beloved I abjure the tyranny of oneness. For you I reject all partisans, especially the partisans of monotheism.

For you I leave you these notes.

Blossoming unevenly. Flowering unsteadily.

For you I invent distracting prayers to soften the slow blurred death of love, choking on poisons our ancestors pleaded with us not to ignore.