An Insufficiency We are Together

Stone walls surrounded by decades-old pine trees. Striated by sunlight. We are the proving ground of angels, or so I say after a long and lonesome winter.

In a dream confusing "Gretel" with "Grendel," and upon waking thinking, kind of a cool confusion. Where we place names in sentences and how it relates to what we hope to get from them. Cardinals, certain helpful women, but altogether a failed prayer.

Legless beggars outside the Vatican. That guy in Scotland who followed me around for days, fish and chips in Amsterdam, and Bloomsday in Dublin, 1989, lonesome in a way I wouldn't untangle for decades.

You can screw up the sentence count and the world won't end, is what I can't quite bring myself to say.

Waiting on dandelions. Stations of the Cross, standalone blowjobs. We talked on a bus leaving Vermont, the wintry blue landscape going on for hours making us happy and voluble. This is not a comment on my father, more like a footnote.

Is it me or are there fewer chickadees this year? Morning sun after many days rain, a kind of quiet joy which was not enough, an insufficiency we are together reconsidering.

End times, end games.  

Sweet potatoes with butter and pepper. Pan-fried noodles with slivered plums and soy sauce. 

Tree grief, grace, grooves in their severed trunks. 

In fact, certain forms of love do go without saying, why do you ask?