An Hour North

A black box, a warning. A good story. One sleeps through their alarm and wakes to find the chores done and the smell of french toast and bacon floating through the house, including here, the back room couch on which they fell to sleep reading Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy for the third time in their life. Gold light filtered by windows hung in the late nineteenth century as if to emphasize the troubles I've seen are only beginning. You deepen all of a sudden and learn without qualification that we are not bodies and so can set the body's concerns gently aside. As in a tent we make love quietly, as before fires on summer mountains we are somewhat less restrained. She touches my shoulder to wake me, asks how I am feeling and later over coffee reminds me I promised to drive with her an hour north to pick up orders at Just Soap. Do you know whose footsteps you hear when you dream? Something is washed away indeed but never our sins for there are no sins. Your grace, child, like your ambition, precedes you.