All of What is Alive in Us

Horse tails swishing flies in late summer. Cumuli tower overhead, dreamy and full of rain that won't fall until somewhere else, another time.

Dragonflies over the garden, swallows over the horse pasture. Sudden - welcome - drops in temperature.

My shoes! Apples thumping in tall grass and clover bunched around deadfall gathered in a pile. 

It makes sense, doesn't it. Making plans later to watch the Perseids, remembering Vermont years ago, making love beneath the Perseids, all night the light shining on you.

And the grackles gather now into flocks, and by the swamp the early maples begin turning. All of what is alive in us now.

Borrowed jackets, borrowed ties. I remember taking my Dad's down vest a couple years after he died and finding two acorns in the inside pocket.

Her breath hitches masturbating. Ordinary days pass becoming more so.

Down past the feeder brook a fox yelps. Sunflowers are the color of something other than the sun.

I am lost now, but it's okay, as I've been lost before. Hospital gowns, hospital blues.

One waits on bad news as one can. Plans dissolving like salt in a river.

Flowing to the Sea in Us

Kosmos emerging through repetition, the pattern of you sucking me, sentencing me, swallowing me, seeding me, saving me, selling me, sorting me, savoring me slipping in me. 

Making space for the shared pathology, giving it light, not antiseptically but lovingly.

What we measure against the calendar, what we measure against the yardstick.

We are never not producing ghosts.

"Houseness."

In early August the sky is the color of the sea which is far away.

In mind, generating.

"For a discussion of the seventeenth century Dutch practices of household maintenance and of the impact they had on Dutch social life, see Schama 1991: 375-480."

Within space, other spaces, and within those spaces, other other spaces, and within those spaces, other other other spaces and . . . 

Hot wet folds of Kosmos.

Fried eggplant, figs, cherry tomatoes and bread soaked in chopped garlic and olive oil.

The way your lips open in certain pictures you send, as if to make clear a new way of thinking about being in space with you ecstatically.

Paradise is empty, awaiting.

A green dress from long ago I imagined you slipping out of for me, somewhere far north where nobody knew us, nor ever would again.

A Vermont of our own choosing.

Ancestral desires, astrological profanities.

Her mother was a librarian, her father a forester.

Crumbling, crying, christening.

Coming.

Coming in you in us for what is new, breathless, light on the river which while not desiring the sea knows nothing but flowing to the sea in us.

Working a Loom in Dim Light

This life in which reading and writing became fundamentally private, acts given to creating spaces in which the self was not at risk in either minor or major ways.

And yet "and yet."

It is the dance which brings forth the dance floor, and the dance floor disappears when the dance is ended.

What shall we talk about next?

I mean how memory works against instinct.

Louise Bourgeois: "Mirrors can be seen as vanity, but that is not all their meaning for the act of looking into a mirror is really about having the courage it takes to look at yourself and really face yourself."

And so on and so forth et cetera.

Freud: "if we are to take it as a truth that knows no exception that everything living dies for internal reasons — becomes inorganic once again — then we shall be compelled to say that 'the aim of all life is death,' and, looking backward, 'inanimate things existed before living ones.'" 

All morning listening to blue jays yet not seeing one and now and then seeing a cardinal in loping flight down by the raspberry bushes.

The cosmos are ornamental, unopposed.

In other words, both life and death aim at returning to a previous state of existence.

Letting go of you in us.

Loving Chrisoula knitting, patterning in the passenger seat as we drive south into Springfield to pick up olives, olive oil and feta.

Panels of sunlight glide slowly across the floor of the room in which I write, as this sentence glides in you reading.

Gently licking you in us, opening you wider in us.

Our monkey paws, our fate.

I am paralyzed by melancholy and nostalgia, sadly working a loom in dim light recalling sailors, poets, physicians, fortune-tellers. 

Intellect as shroud.

To suck is to repeat what pattern?

In you already it is Fall in which I join you in the city of our choices settling in us like grains of sand in a participatory cosmos of a kind god's making. 

Jesus-based Intervention Strategies

Ask what I want! Less guilty maybe, or less willing to prioritize this or that sexual act. Emotions are data points we confuse with actual goals. We stop washing the car in order to save water, which everybody thinks is silly, but still. Pausing to remember Oreo cookies at six years old. Spiritual poverty clarified as an impediment to Jesus-based intervention strategies. Always all these notes for later. Schopenhauer argues that it is impossible to imagine happiness because it "cannot dwell where, as Plato says, continual Becoming and never Being is all that takes place." Boiling water for pasta, then forgetting what you're boiling water for. Driving three hours over back roads into Sturbridge to pick up my mother. Everybody has an opinion about the best flavor of ice cream. Mental bucket acquisition processes are nontrivial. So much of my writing is premised on the tension between "too late" and "late but not too late." Joy where once there was not joy, and peace where once there was war.

My Little Saint Lingering

Beginning the morning's sentences later than usual. Beautifully, boldly. What do we reclaim and why. When. Requisite chemicals. Your mushroom is my little saint lingering on the tongue. Absent sexlessness what? As if the painful thing were not there to be gone through but rather not looked at at all. Reading Ron Silliman poems on a plane to Austin Texas. But you cannot get away! Hills and streams mostly, sometimes open fields. Neighbors who overemphasize the appearance of the lawn vs. neighbors who overemphasize not overemphasizing the appearance of the lawn. Is it conflicts or turtles all the way down, I forget. One thinks of birds in the forest that do not want to be seen. Hemlocks and maples and even birches. Positing a nexus between wishes and what works. I shall look away then. Elephantinely. Oh river forgive me. Oh autumn have faith.

Scriptures on my Heart

Morning grates. Her notes are indicative of a space we will not broach in this lifetime, a sorrow I can only just manage, and yet. Sitting quietly in darkness, listening to bat wings whisper in moist air above me. Her visits when I was little inscribed scriptures on my heart which you are meant to elucidate through a fire for which - as yet - you will not allow yourself to be responsible. All these endings, all these plot points we can't admit we wish had evolved differently or to finality. As if. The horse's eye clouds over and we sink into familiar horrors, expensive ones. With the curtain drawn, prisms do nothing, yet one is not bereft thereby. My whole life has been a war with the void - I am a soldier of memory - which was exactly what the void wanted, which is all that matters, if I remember correctly. Dragging my feet in dewy grass, in no hurry to finish. Oh ______ forgive me, show me the new chapel, send me a woman for whom my knees and tongue are worthy and not unwelcome.

Between Honor and Mercy

Do not disregard Camus' insight that travel strips us of the means by which we efface and ignore our fundamental loneliness. It is possible we shall die without being delivered, one unto the other. How close to the house certain crows come, as if actually bearing a message, or wanting to see more closely what we are doing. Doors open, floorboards creak. Morning passes reading and writing, thousands of words on a theme of transgression, at last understood as fundamentally creative. We have many sexual partners over the course of a life, many of whom stay with us in various ways, forever inflecting the ongoing study of ecstasy. A nexus between honor and mercy often misnamed forgiveness. Is it possible that space is generated by the existence of multiple - indeed, infinite perhaps - viewpoints? Listening to the neighbor hammer boards together for what I can't say feels religious. All these encounters, not one of which reaches the core.

If I'm Still Enough I Don't Exist

This story is fiction, and fiction is a lie, but from within the story, it's not a lie: it's just this: this this.

Starlings leap through the hemlocks, asking me for nothing. If I'm still enough I don't exist, am not worth noticing. Even my lies are of no consequences but wait - is that a different story?

Sometimes when I pass Ogunquit orchard I remember the poem I wrote for you there - the one about apple blossoms in your hair and making love in the farthest corner, advancing a theme of indifference to male owners and their bizarre notions of owning the earth - and wonder what it means that we will never make love there.

The river did not crest the banks in that storm. In another, it was so dry the stars came down to fill it with their tears. Strike that (yeah that's right - I'm editing as I go - you got a problem with that?). There's another story - but wait. Did I say that already too?

I'm almost lost now in antique stores, without parents or grandparents. It's just a coffin from the outside in. Or are we all one - that is to say, nothing together - already. 

Simulate me. Her songs in mid-morning leave me wandering interior landscapes from which it is not possible to escape. 

That is to say, in some stories she eats you and in others she starves you but in some, she is healed, and whole, and you are never without her, nor hungry nor hurt.

Let's go somewhere where we can smell the sea. Let's be as one, you and me. As the sun? The sun's mother, my sister, no lover left undone.

You Have to Go Hungry in the Moonlight

What if the wounds never heal? The ones we receive, the ones we administer. We say they heal - we buy books that assure us that they heal - but maybe they don't heal. What God would allow this? Going on hurt forever. What if you were wrong when you were right and right when you were wrong and what if that was okay? Who would have to look away to make it so? Is there something we can use to distract them? Is there another way this moment could be, apart from what you'd like to be the truth? What you're calling "Truth" - what do they call it in the church down the road? In the next town? Those cardinals you reduced to symbols for forty years aren't waiting on salvation - from you or anyone else. Sometimes when I close my eyes I can see you, other times I have to fill-in-the-blanks with what happens to be around. The military isn't your friend is a hard fact to admit but there you go. She's not asking you to kneel - how many times do you have to go hungry in the moonlight to remember this? There's a better story around here somewhere but I'm not allowed to look for it. Or when I find it let anyone know.

What's Really Happening

You think you're making patterns but what's really happening is that you're noticing patterns. It feels good to put the puzzle together. Eat the puzzle? It's easy to overlook how new pieces keep appearing, and the puzzle itself doesn't resemble anything familiar or beautiful. Hornets jostle the windows; the hemlocks fill with blue jays and wrens. "I want this and I don't want this" is only a problem if you think "I" can mean less than at least two things. It's not a bad morning listening to the neighbors cutting up a fallen tree after yesterday's storm. The storm three days ago? It's funny how time swallows itself, leaving you happy but not exactly in the life you keep insisting is somebody else's.

Shared Fire

Suddenly the gods are speaking to me again. Suddenly there are all these stories and I don't have to choose just one. It's like never having to share a breast again. Wait - who says that that way? The grass is soft this time of year, but apple trees are prettier in spring. The grackles are gathering in flocks; it's the time of year when we used to sing songs about corn. We've both paid a high price to end up living in this cold Christian parsonage on this slow-dying Main Street in this forgettable, soon-to-be-forgotten town. And you can't say the world is better off. I did something my father never could and I want to tell him it's okay, you live, it's different after, but it's okay. Or is that him speaking to me from beyond the grave? We are like boards when we die and life goes on building itself into whatever version is next. Blind gods playing with bones, angry gods being stuffed into boxes, Great Aunt gods tending the shared fire. "I have to tell you a story - you're not going to like it but it's a good one. Your father told it to me when we met." Is that it? The throats of the chickens open so easily; and somebody is always looking for a boy to adopt. Sister, at night, facing the darkness the way we learned, I can Her singing strange songs to nobody in particular.

Neither Effaced Nor Elided

Desire. 

Not sorrow but desire for the thing not possessed. But formerly possessed.

The known wanted for the first time again.

The given tasted again.

This want whose power is that it does not hide. Does not act in secret. Its name consonant with its self in the world.

Itself in the world.

You who teach me so I might teach you what you can only remember by seeing it in me.

The holy - the very sacred - vice-versa.

Which does not ruin itself with denial, stupefy itself with gluttony. Whose table adjusts to accommodate everyone. The hawk of language and the mouse of the unconscious. The taxpayer and the whore.

Which overturns tables in the sacristy and temples and which says "those tables in the sacristy and temples aren't going to overturn themselves . . . "

Neither effaced nor elided but accepted. Welcomed.

We who are on our knees accordingly.

Who move through the world with nothing on our mind or in our heart but love: this love. 

Love Quietly as an Afterthought

At dusk battening the chickens.

Yesterday was a storm. Today another. 

My tiredness and sorrow are like oceans pulling me into their low places. Folded towels hanging on doors, making it hard to close the doors.

Her breasts, thighs, how she stands a certain way undressing. Letters home. 

A mailbox full of violets. Summer lights.

We make love quietly, an afterthought in a long day. Trucks on Route Nine. My distressed heart. My wallet.

Why are you the man without shoes. Do I dance, ever, yes, often, when I think nobody can see, doesn't everyone that way.

Or how do you see yourself, or are you seen.

Sweetnesses, sadnesses.

Bolts gone through me, littering my heart with ash and salt. Greek insights into oral sex.

Time's up, out, always.

As if Borrowed

A sweetness in the story. A lack. 

I sit in a rocking chair and write all morning. Arms aching from cutting down trees.

Heart aching from cutting down trees.

Answers I did not give: Macintosh, birch, pizza. I'm not fond of organ meats. 

I don't like jazz the way I pretend and think I ought. Same with the Doors. And Donovan.

Men in my family who died in fights.

Men who died with guns in their hands.

Slowly coming forward, chickadees on my shoulders, Hildegard's medicinal texts tucked beneath one arm. 

A sorrow. A settlement.

You offer your heart to Jesus and he tells you not to worry. From your shoulder spring green fronds, from your hands blood.

How close we got, and yet how far away we always stayed. As if burdened. As if borrowed by others on terms we could not break. 

Kindling for a Fire

As if you are not lost. Now the ocean is a memory so now what? 

The sun sets. High over the hill between you and Emily Dickinson a single bald eagle glides gently in circling winds.

You made a sudden turn and she is with you still: you are with me still. 

Jesus is with me still.

Let me murmur Kenyan good night songs. Let me lead elephants to safe watering holes.

That cross never did anybody any good, yet here we are, in love and working to extend that love yet further.

Lala salama. 

Lake lover.

We nearly made it to easy laughter.

I put on my boots and gather kindling for a fire. I wait all night for a sign from the Lord it's okay to sleep and no sign comes, yet in the morning I waken.

Morning glories and a flower I do not know the name of. Ghost dogs, ghost bears, ghost crows.

Rain wash me. Lover, forgive me. Love me still.

At a great distance - across lifetimes - this love.

The Shell I Picked Up in Ireland

Hang up the phone and your heart breaks.

Between Route Nine and the river, picking up the mail and visiting family. 

Cars pass as if people had anywhere to go.

Go anywhere and your heart breaks.

I cry in Goshen, cry in the post office and when somebody asks am I okay I say softly "I lost somebody dear."

Nobody is dead. Someone is dear.

Nobody is lost.

This broken heart reliving the breaks of 1988 and 89, when I really did visit Ireland, coming back so deeply broken I nearly died. 

You want to write and say "I forgot to tell you about the shell I picked up in Ireland and have carried with me ever since."

"You're just sad." "Out of sorts." "Away from Jesus but finding your way back." 

You have prayers to pray, poems to write.

A non-zero sum game to play alone mostly. Be conscientious now. Be reasonable. 

"Shit happens." 

You have this heart, and it is broken. 

Now what.

In No Rush to Finish

Getting something. Somewhere? It's not a plan so much as a hope, or rather a landscape gone into more or less mapless, yet not without intention. That old pizza place in Chester Vermont, where they named a vegetarian sandwich after me in 1998. Brentano's writing reappears and one decides to call it a "critical juncture" in order to justify reading him closely yet yet again. Slowing down in order to hear better, in no rush to finish the job, and yet not reaching any clarity with respect to what the child is trying to say. At the last moment she pulls back and jerks me off, as always fascinated by roping streams of ejaculate gleaming on her hand, wrist and floor. Pumpkin guts, candle scents. Fox tracks. We are what we long for and what we take and we are also what we despise and refuse, and everything else as well. So there? Your secret is safe with me! The hymns, I say, they do not sing themselves.

Again I Lay the Useless Cross

The mountain is briefly visible in clouds off I-91. We mistake the role certain women have played in our living for roles we asked them to play, they wanted to play, actually played, et cetera. 

Warm beer.

Twice after midnight going outside to pace back and forth on the porch, listening to night songs at a distance, a sense the world is okay, or will be.

Saint Hildegard protect us.

We drive west into Stockbridge to visit the shrine, driven by prayers that we can make only clumsily. Sunlight, bright clouds floating overhead, and dandelions. Working up the nerve to wear clothing that's colorful.

Perhaps I am in a woman's body after all, or a secret longing from the nineteenth century tenuously embodied forty or fifty miles west of the generative affair. Boston as a state of mind.

And: begin.

Begone! Beyond the range of the Taconics, a sense of space we will never reach, nor even try, as if west really were just an idea. 

Stroking my cock, slow and patient, coming silently so as not to wake her, and yet she does awaken, turning to me with her eyes closed, her breath a warm recurrent pressure against my bare shoulder, where once again I lay the useless cross.

Travel plans, farm stands.

Garage bands. Clock hands.

Marriage banns.

Jasper promises to write or call but does not, and the heat becomes even more oppressive, making it hard to decide whether to try again or not to reach him.

You grate, groan, go into me gorgeously.

The Mirror for No Obvious Reason

What happens in August. Wind blows apples off the apple tree. I choose against this or that disclosure. Liver pain is a family problem, not one you want to have, and I have it now, now I have it.

At night the stars are beautiful over the barn in a way that released me from needing them to beautiful in any other way. Neighbors' voices. Dreams through which one spins, always opting for the next dream, and the next, and the next. "I am not worthy," I say to Jesus, who gently responds that nobody is, including him, and it is this shared unworthiness that redeems us.

Mall rats. Mobile phones.

Masturbation.

Class action lawsuits that do, in some instances, make the world a better place. When your face is pressed tight against the glass, when the mirror for no obvious reason knows your name.

Vietnam in the early sixties and other sins.

The plants make clear your place and one begins the requisite undoing of homage, idolization, et cetera. What happens in the sacristy does not stay in the sacristy.

Of course we were not given the full text of the third secret, does the world as it appears to you not make this clear? Your swan song is my serendipitous meeting in a country lane.

The twentieth century has cast a long shadow (and other confirmations of light).

Priapic hymns, Hermetic lullabies, swan songs.

The Answer is a Form of Love

There are times when Her silence is a form of exquisite torture, which is embarrassing to say, but we are made of what we're made of, it's no use denying it. Bawling goats, cooing chickens. Five crows in a line on a branch off a maple tree off Dawson Road. Sometimes the east-facing window grows bright and red, sunlight streaming through a dead hemlock tree, amazing those with eyes to see. How deep we go. How we decompose at levels that make us realize dying is neither the problem nor a solution. This is the only question we are to answer: "what is reality" and the answer is a form of love which we are learning to bring forth, which may or may not be contingent on bodies and in any case is subject to revision, even at this last stage. You are a mother yet other responsibilities and interests obtain. Ways in which Upper Highland Lake in Goshen Massachusetts remains an idealized locale to me, yet one that - upon visiting - no longer resonates as such. Yeah, yeah, yeah (like really - why was that in the chorus). We who are given to self-destructive impulses as well as the idea of healing. Yet if you can when the time allows, respond to my questions as deeply and attentively as possible. What is honesty, what is plain to see. I who am more grateful than you can imagine still.

In Distant Bracken, Boyish Voices

Light breezes, barely enough to beat back the late July heat. Chainsaws in distant bracken, boyish voices where the river is.

And if I sold it, what would happen? Hiding behind vast urns full of grain in order to see the Goddess who knows we are watching but who, like us, depends on secrecy.

Sexuality in the kitchen. Nodding but not speaking in order to make and by extension emphasize a point.

Boston. The tin roof over the neighbor's barn buckling.

Leaving notes in order to clarify I will neither see nor seek to see another winter. Stems of lilies gone brittle in sunlight.

When once we lived in Chester Vermont. People talk as they drive past, in dialogue with selves they know better than they realize.

Abrupt departures in form. Laura Riding but at a distance, an unbridgeable one.

Gaps in the fence, pretty flags with bunnies on them waving in light breezes. What we've said already and will never say again.

And the glade darkens. Mid-afternoon cumuli acquire the hue of storms, floating like roses down a mythological river.

Of whom I am not allowed to speak, of whom even this much constitutes unnecessary flirtation with denial. Scent of hay, cut pine, dried snake skin, rain.

Notes in the Margin

I doubt Abraham was happy about the whole Isaac thing but that doesn't redeem him, at least in my book. Some gods aren't worth the price of admission.

I have seventeen bottles full of rocks from mostly New England. I have notes in the margin of almost every book of poems I ever owned.

Eagles cross the sky too far away to say are they eagles or something plainer. I survived half a dozen encounters with marbles as a child, and can say nothing else about that at the moment.

Yet ask: who will save you when the monster at last rises from the pond - the fields and forests - and comes to eat you alive? Jesus practicing unfamiliar dance steps on the bridge over Watts Brook and - let's face it - he's not bad, not bad at all.

Swing sounds. Lawnmowers.

Secret bowers in which we pledge to one another our love forever. We are not forgiven who refuse to forgive our own selves.

Venus at an hour and in a state which broaches ecstatic. Faint cries of a rooster somewhere west.

This is also the earth! We are trapped in both the 1970s and the nineteenth century and the decor is primarily nautical, agricultural with a hint of hippie.

The shelves arc and bow and the many books on them begin to slip away. Behind us, memory stirs a thin wake that never disappears and yet professes nothing but its intention to disappear.

Favorable outcomes are the problem, maybe. Days pass, then years, and then you find yourself in hottest summer wondering when they'll let you out, say sure, try again.

The Myth of Our Composition

It takes time, I guess, or something else I don't have. You make the morning sacred to the maximal degree, then sink into writing, thousands upon thousands of words, all of which are the latest entry into a vast compendium of spells and arguments and recipes and hymns. I won't ever take you again becomes a plea to be filled one last time, as if I were a waterskin on the shoulder of a woman who is probably strong enough but you'll never know now. How deeply we must enter the myth of our composition, so deeply that we risk death itself. Even this poem is just a list of things that went right once, and could have gone wrong. Goats and sheep cry hungrily and those who have ears and can feed them respond accordingly. Me, I just sit here with my books, in which every page goes slowly blank. "Like your heart?" you ask, licking your lips, and I sigh, needing neither to rush you out nor succumb anymore to these bland seductions.

A Lifetime of Collected Stones

I wouldn't write but it appears I have to say something again, something that got lost in the mid-eighties. From my perch in the hay loft - between books and guitars and a lifetime of collected stones - I watch chickadees hop from branch to branch in the hemlock tree. Pale sun, frail son. Some of the men who scared me are still alive, and what can anyone do about this? Days pass stacking tires along the canvas tarps that will keep the hay at least a little bit dry. Snakes pass with their mouths full of toads who are maybe saying goodbye, maybe asking for help. I remember mornings going out into the fields, wondering how far I'd get before that little voice began calling me home. Even now you can hear it, a breeze just over the hill, a thunder storm on the other side of the river.

Relational Conflagration

Perhaps nobody needs anything and all this was just a confused cry in the darkness. At 5 a.m. I wade through grass to feed and water the chickens, pausing briefly to admire Venus, bright as a glass bead between branches of rusting hemlock and, closer to the barn, actual beads of dew on which royal purples glisten and shimmer. When you fall in love, you don't know you are falling because it feels like a joining, but when you land you realize you are not not-alone and it's okay - it's more than okay - which is all love ever teaches anybody. The coffee, the cold calls, the interior chrysanthemum floating in a mountain brook. Miniature cities in which lovers consent to relational conflagration. Five nights running the ghost of a certain dead dog appeared, accompanying me through difficult hours and work I have yet to sufficiently understand. A woman tosses in bed and I watch from what feels like a thousand miles away but is actually just here, just another dream in just another skull, going nowhere but wherever the current says. Late, but not too late, and with the precise joy becoming of a priest, I embrace the pure neutrality of Love.

Murmurs and Rumors

After rain. The trees are like saints, old hemlocks so tight with grace no disturbance or distance is possible. Who cried, who told the truth despite the many good reasons not to, and who ended up in a small town far away from home?

Jesus is a way of emphasizing beginnings. When shall we be captured? 

Antiquated texts. Letters to mothers.

Sex at 5 a.m., unusually urgent, the heat yet to begin yet our bodies sweating, birds sounding tentative from over beyond the barn. Demands to which I acquiesce gratefully. Growling coming because of the deep place touched.

Coffee after. And after coffee, sex again, but sexlessly, soundlessly, shamelessly.

Aa.

The lake was almond-shaped and stories were told about what had disappeared into its depths, one or two of which were affirmatively frightening. An early emphasis on cannabis.

On a platypus anarchist.

Ambergris.

After rain, finding oneself in twilit writing naturally softening, and by softening elongating, the sentences reminding me why I shift in their direction always. Blue jay feathers, smooth stones in the river, towering clouds, and other non-iconic icons.

And murmurs and rumors, all saying what.

Certain Prayers Are Now More Helpful

Morning quiet, soft skies. I make a pot of tea for Chrisoula, then coffee for me. It's really interesting how well math works.

Slipping into poetics as a means of persuasion. You have to be brave and cunning and act fast, seems to be one of the lessons of the fairy tale. We talk about Greek gods all the way to Pittsfield.

Mirrors abound. Lately blue jays have been the augurers but the real point is that augury is not extinct. To what critical ideas are you adjacent?

Sweating cleaning the barn. Rice, zucchini, roasted green beans. A folding shovel used in WWII that's a bit rusty but still basically functional. 

Who died? Hours pass in the back room trying to integrate. I have memories that I cherish, others by which I am haunted.

Paper snowflakes. Sleep patterns. Phases in which we don't want to be seen.

A sense that certain prayers are now more helpful than others, and so praying accordingly. Something is always being born, no?

You Made Happen this Lovely Presence

The one who is in my life as a god who is in life on behalf of Love. 

Handjobs punctuated by deep kisses, the parking lot mid-day, as if what? Who is looking and who is no longer looking away. 

Gasoline rainbows, beautiful and useless, or harmful. Decks of cards, beautiful and functional.

Broken rubber bands, beautiful and dysfunctional and therefore beautiful.

Who at night reminds me to balance my fear for the sheep with respect for the neighbors and the lines that bind us and indeed, half an hour later, the sheep are quietened thusly.

Who is rain falling all night, cool breezes all night, and near dawn is roosters crowing, cacophonous cries criss-crossing the landscape, like overdoing consonance but in a way makes clear you know how to be consonant. 

And Narcissus always, and the rank pool always, and the faint - barely noticeable, always unactionable - regret always.

Writing cross-legged for you.

Red threads and bangles on your wrist.

Eyes closed at the end, head back, and your soft "mmmm" at the end, like liking what you saw you made happen. 

This lovely presence, this instructive relationship, this needed-like-oxygen healing.

So it doesn't make sense to the world, so what.

And fifteen, and sixteen.

And all these prisms, all these rainbows, and all this light!

At dawn with coffee writing you love letters, cross-legged on the couch, thinking how much of my life was given to writing love letters to women who were grateful to receive them and who thus gave me writing, this writing.

The horses in sunlight, dew on the clover.

All this without distance, instantly: this us, and that us, and all the other us's unto infinity.

Kneeling is Welcome, Revered, Allowed

Soon a storm will come. I say what I say, then sit back and listen. A lifetime.

The Universe is a distinction within What-Cannot-Be-Named. The west-facing window is full of clouds and wind. My legs hurt. My jaws are tired from chewing so much meat.

Sunlight in the grape arbor. Bones of cows. Snakes escaping through seams in the concrete.

You put eating pussy on the table, so I eat pussy again.

Hail Mary, full of grace.

What Hermes wants and does not want in his capacity as Messenger. Environments and circumstances in which kneeling is welcome, revered, allowed.

Footnotes are sexy. Footnote fetishes. Footnotes within footnotes within footnotes. It is footnotes all the way - but you know this already.

What you know already, what I still have to teach you.

The distance that separates us widens, becomes unbridgeable. Unsolvable? Well, not unnameable anyway. The universe is a distinction within a distinction within a distinction within "but you know this already." 

Crescent moon, starlit wells of sky.

Starlight, the Standishes, sellouts. Satisfactions. Seals.

Once again I open my arms, my heart, my mind to accept it. All always. And always always you. 

Not Romantic, Just Irregular

I wrote "Our patriarchal emphasis on linearity and hierarchy creates the illusion that it's better to be this or that."

Compassion arises as a natural function. We are not throwing away anything, let alone the ape. Leonard Cohen dying alone.

Alone in blue lights.

Captured for her, made safe for her. Kneeling in clover to see if the fallen pears are soft enough for the horses. It's a language thing mainly. 

A Creator needs others to maximize and extend creation. Traveling to other states to protest executions there.

Certain libraries in western New York. Beads, buttercups. We got lost on back roads and it was not romantic, just irregular.

Nobody is doomed.

Yet ask: what is the fundamental issue that needs to be addressed? 

Frames.

Her image is interior, glowing, a living flame. 

Centering prayer, settling there. All is well and all that is well is well.

I mean a little church for one who needs reminding that the altar is already everywhere.

Lost in Sadnesses

You do the right thing until you stop and then what you did becomes no longer the right thing. 

"Ideas leave not their source."

Mowing under the hemlocks at 10 a.m.

Storms pass in the distance, leaving our valley dry. Fireflies, foreplay.

The peacock opens its fan.

Who is it about?

We walked slowly, a few feet apart, gazing at pottery that was too expensive for us to buy, not talking, lost in sadnesses that we were learning would be with us forever.

Long drives. Losses.

There is nothing it is like to be a chair. Ornaments.

Your lips parting, indicative of things to come.

It gets complicated. Lying about the nature of our concern to those who are essentially lying by asking about our concerns. The salesman, the coordinator.

The priest.

Your footsteps on the stairs and later the bed sighing as you lay down next to me. Rain falling, thunder rumbling.

Anyway, you can't run away in a maze.