Not Yet Beyond Learning

How blue the river can be in late winter, winding between horse-sized rocks and banks dotted with remnant snow and shadows of pine. How smoky I get drawing near you, like a fire in the late hours! Driving west alone is a kind of release, a letting go, a kind of sensing that one has been wrong in critical ways but is not yet beyond learning. Precious openings unto the Lord? Well, the day before a storm, the world visibly careening, and my woman worried, visibly.

One walks all morning to find a gap in the trees by which to enter the forest and then enters the forest, albeit alone and without a dog (which are two different conditions). When you kneel in late winter and study pools where the river slows and becomes glassy - where once you looked for trout, plotting without remorse to kill - you see how you are transparent, or translucent, and that there is nothing to let go of, including the idea of letting go. Joy and the juncture at which one finds it and Jes - I mean joy and the juncture at which one finds it, period. Religion, then. Fidelity.

Flexibility? Well, a Law that works for as many of us as possible anyway. One does mostly love the one they're with, doesn't one. Buddha goes on being a statue of the Buddha no matter how much patchouli you rub on his ceramic scalp. One allows for color - blue, say - and over a decade the world falls apart in a way that begs to be redeemed. It was not love exactly, as it taught me to understand love, and yet without it, what else but love was even possible? I don't know what I don't know and long only to be met in that emptiness, make love and tea and bread in that emptiness, and rest at last (in her arms) in that emptiness.

She shrugs leaning in kissing me and what is loose on her shoulders falls to the floor - it is yellow and soft to touch and it does not fall to the floor - but hangs in the dim light forever, an infinite flare in eternal summer, as if Albany were Jerusalem, the motel room a sacristy, and our unapologetic nakedness the only gift a loving God could ask.

Yesterday, walking back from the river as the sun rose, a low mist filled the meadow and I could not see below my knees. How cold it was! When I turned to you, you were there, and though I did not know what to give you nor how to even address you in my wretchedness and grief, you did not leave or judge me. A woman leans into the sky to open a window, letting a blue and gold light stream into my body, and after all those years alone we are at last alone together, and thus arrive in one another in a slow way, an earned way, a way that renders the whole world the very possibility of happiness, ours.