Black Bear Sightings

More thunder but far away. No more rain for the moment. I roll the windows down and breathe cool clean air. Cars pass on Route nine, lights on, tires hissing.

I've never been to many places but they still exist. Do they exist?

There was a song in college, old then I think, called "Cool Change" and I don't know why I liked it but I did. Lots of Dead songs back then, until I got hooked on Dylan, and then no more Dead songs to speak of (but shows still, and acid, like having a razor blade in my skull). 

When you arrange your life around black bear sightings and don't see a black bear for going on five years, then what?

You arrange your life around something else.

I have never been past Saint Louis, but I have been to Dublin and Rome. 

My heart is not a motel, it's a mountain. Your heart is not a cathedral but the sky into which the mountain my heart is rises. For years I associated fox sightings with death, and cardinals with God, but I'm in a new space now and don't know what anything means.

We invent new mythologies by falling in love with strangers, which means they're no longer strangers.

Once I said "fuck Texas" and a woman from Texas made me apologize.

For many years of my living living has been arranged in part - sometimes a nontrival part - around monasteries, the idea of them. 

If Minnesota were New York and New York Minnesota . . . 

If time were not measured in hours and days.

At night the mountain asks the sky what all the lights cast across it are, and the sky does not answer.

Yet not answering is a kind of answer. 

My heart is in actuality a motel, one that's open to lonely travelers like me who get lost on all these highways because nobody taught them how to steer by starlight.

Thunder, lightning! Time to go . . . 

How strange to discover so close to the end you knew the way all along.