Stones in Our Shoes

Four a.m. is not sacred but at four a.m. what is sacred finds itself in me and is not scared to blossom. Best decision ever was putting the old green couch - scavenged from a Cape Cod house-cleaning fifteen years ago - into the kitchen facing the stove. Sometimes the poems write themselves and sometimes the loneliness won't even let you remember that you write poems. Throws its tendrils into still morning dark? A point at which pajamas no longer mattered, at which sleep and sex began to commingle in deliberate - if not always satisfying - ways. The church steeple in gold light in Burlington Vermont in summer '88, reflected in broken glass in the driveway where I knelt crying. Bamboo bird cages, turtle shell combs, diaries in German covered with dust. One does not rebel against that from which one cannot meaningfully or otherwise separate, and yet rebellion runs its viral course. Dreams of absolute certainty break upon waking, like dropping a tea cup in winter. Hand-delivered ultimatums? The mail was never for us anyway. A fever, a favor, a fortune, a fall. A thousand years pass - ten thousand years pass - and neither the gift nor the giver change. Why do we go on troubled, stones in our shoes, unsure of our companion? Waxing poetic under winter stars, cardinals asleep in the pines. The absence of Jesus is Christ but what is the absence of Christ?