The Heart of the Mother at Home

Half circles nudging the dew off stiff clover. Nursery rhymes.

Dead maple leaves stranded in avian netting casting thin shadows on old chickens who - rare in these parts - will die a natural death.

Time in which to kiss each point on the circumference of your aureola, stubbled chin grazing the nipple.

What story am I telling you, my ocean, my hole in the sky, my dearest emptiest only one.

Promises, promises.

Pretty girls, popular boys and all the rest of us keeping up.

October fastens me to now-harvested apple trees, making a handsome pair of corpses. Death is neither the end nor an escape nor a beginning.

Fighting against the urge to rest and then fighting against fighting against the urge to rest.

Later the sentences help elucidate the actual conflict. What falls apart falls apart and what is reconstructed is not what fell apart. In Africa once.

And yet. There are all these rules, there are all these capital letters.

What we call it - awareness, consciousness, mind, Light of God, nirvana - does not change its nature or function but rather the community in which we speak of it.

A sound the tree makes falling, torn from its roots and its roots shivering in the earth, and all of watching in bright sunlight this rehearsal of our own inevitable destruction.

The country of tea in the kingdom of coffee in the heart of the mother at home.

Hard coughs in the middle of the night indicating something has gone wrong somewhere but what and to whom and what shall we - who have never been very good at answering these kinds of questions - do.

I mean really: what shall we do here in the heart of what has no heart.