Every Way but This

This dull heart experiencing itself as a muscle for the first time in forty some odd years. Geography merging with memory.

Manifest desire.

At night I dream of oceans slowly rolling up beaches in moonlight where no human foot has ever been.

After days fasting I close my eyes and become symbiotic, psychedelic.

CCR songs while driving west to pick up five hundred pounds of chicken food.

Spiritual smorgasbords at which we gorge, pretending we are somebody else.

This all too common today for so casual a leaf.

Dismantling the affair for spare parts, whatever I can take with me into the next phase of the marriage. 

The radical anthropomorphism.

She shudders coming, hand fisted near parted lips, eyes closed, reminding me of how poor I am in almost every way but this.

Bellies of swallows as they turn in the late August sunlight. Back roads, backsies. Backpacks.

Say there were fifteen disciples rather than twelve: what story would have been served thereby? What poem or other process is served by wondering why?

Getting high on the shore of Lake Champlain, later taking her hand and kissing near the water away from the others, her whispering "I'll do it if you want" unzipping my jeans, the whole night with her like swimming between the stars even now. 

And the sky will yet be free of us.

Chris comes over to talk, cheerful in the way he is cheerful, name-dropping local names, and I wonder for not the last time will I ever be free of the monkey?

Old men in the hay barn smiling at me, almost fifty years ago, and I pause stacking the bales remembering them, and how happy it was possible to be, in the days that came before these days came.