We Offer what We Refuse

Densely packed hay bales. Trails we make by walking. When I look up, the moon is falling apart over the barn, and I understand how it is not the moon but my heart, and how there is a light which transcends all of this. Stacking rocks around the foundation. Wintering-over skunks.

When I walk in winter in warm billows up and down main street, lost in the specific way I become lost, and rescued in the unpredictable ways I am - to date - rescued.

Footsteps upstairs and how we know who they belong to. Sitting quietly writing as morning slides slowly into something public.

What we offer, what we refuse to offer.

I remember sitting on a bench on Boston Common in 1987 or so, lost in a way that would not be resolved for many years, and which did not involve being found.

Reheated coffee. Stale donuts half price which I buy happily and eat while driving to the river just shy of the Vermont border.

One leans against the wall near the door, arms folded, digging coffee grounds from the hollows that fill their mouth, crushing them then swallowing, rehearsing a certain argument.

A game in which there are neither winners nor losers. The round face of the public clock atop the church.

Who is committed and who is not?

Punctuation is not about rules but rhythm.

Driving home just after dark, the sky still on fire but fading, city lights to my right growing dim as I lean on the gas, eager to leave the highway, and I remember the man I was, and the boy who became that man, and the child who far back who knew nothing and had to build it all, and hold it all, and not fall ever and who mostly hasn't, even now.

Avoid averages.

Sad outside the grocery store, early December passing in a lonely way, my heart not working the way it once did, and other signs I am nearly done with the book I was assigned all those years ago in Burlington, in a different world, in a body that was only beginning to realize its function.