The Mane of the Blind Horse

Hosta leaves wet with rain. Natal charts. Pregnant elephants. 

Eels fried in butter with salt and thyme.

Bicycles offered at the driveway's end, gone before noon, even the Free sign.

Seasonal promises.

Seats in which we are no longer comfortable and yet linger in because of poems we wrote in them years ago. This love, and the loves against which it measures itself, murders itself, remembers itself. 

Stroking the mane of the blind horse, his left eye sewn shut forever, telling him I love him for how faithful he is to my daughter. 

Beautiful Venus, beautiful Jesus. One combs through old texts looking for translations of Gregory of Nyssa that align with their sense the universe is not as orderly as it appears.

Dickinson's sense of the cosmos as destructive and creative both, and realizing in a way that what we describe as awakening is basically a formal reproduction of a worldview shaped by a lifetime of deep and sustained reading.

Dried red berries. Bittersweet. Pumpkins on the porch making us happier than it seems we have a right to be, yet here we are

Sweet sixteen. The edge of Seventeen. Eighteen-wheelers grinding the miles. The average age of U.S. combat troops in Vietnam.

Twenty.