Taught by Hawks or Angels

The allowances we make! I write all morning, the clouds of the past two days rolling away, taking a wet snow with them. I begin circling again - the sentence, the subject, the sun - as if in a past life I was taught by hawks or angels the proper way to worship (which is merely to survey the world intensely). When you reach the laws, you begin to wonder at the law-maker, and when you search for the law-maker, you reach a woman for whom your intellect and wit are a test she passed lifetimes ago and is called to administer now unto you. As the day progresses - breakfast, work, phone calls, cooking, chores - one's understanding of the various social cues diminishes, only to be regained in dreams that retain the vivid intensity of childhood. Don't say "yes" so much as "thank you" and "how can I help." The writing is a teacher but the reader who says "yes" to its implicit request is your spiritual therapist, given that you might remember how to form the words "thank you" and "how can I help" with your otherwise clumsy tongue. A witch? Well, there is something dangerous in your mind that the forest quiets and the sea obliterates. Be not afraid indeed. Salt, yeast, sandalwood, thyme. Basil, rivers and poorly-tuned mandolins. My senses steer me to your body, oblivious to distance and etiquette, begging my soul to write whatever poem will make you naked (all the nakeds) fastest. Put a rose in your sentences, put its stem in your mouth. In the dream, there are no more pages for me to fill and none for you to turn. Shall we write at the same table over coffee? Shall we mortgage personal circumstances for the Lord?