"Oh I have nothing to say," says the one who is never not saying something. When was Jesus actually born?
Love letters read while deer hunting, the gun forgotten, father forgotten, men forgotten.
Cats sleeping in patches of sunlight on the bed while I write. Imaginary gunslingers challenging us to duels that beget no consternation because all conflict is imaginary. Coins, porcelain cows, salt and pepper shakers and other things people in my family have collected.
Remembering a grilled cheese sandwich Mrs. Fisk made me in Sunapee, New Hampshire forty some odd years ago and wishing it were possible to say "thank you" again, now I understand what was actually being given in that moment.
Picturing kissing you somewhere near Emily Dickinson's grave, wondering when, if ever, I'll get past wanting to kiss helpful women. What is sacred, sexual, silly, sad.
What is peach sorbet.
Eddies in the brook, unpublished essays I wrote about ignoscency, and news about an old girlfriend's husband committing suicide in their barn, a kind of sadness and wanting to help that resolves to nothing but this sentence.
It's context all the way down and stances all the way out. Talking over coffee about what a pain in the ass A Course in Miracles is but also, thank Christ for A Course in Miracles.
Subtext, always subtext.
We sailed past the lighthouse to where the sea was rougher than felt safe and upended the urn with Jack's ashes, praying in cold winds that some of us cut with whiskey.
Another spring, another sorrow. Another spiritual interrogation of one's fear of death and love.
At night by the river in starlight I remember the men who taught me that pain was a privilege, especially psychic pain, all without speaking a word, and wonder did they think they were helping, and does it help now if they did.
Yet I like holding hands in spring, making breakfast for the kids, and especially like walking after dinner with you past fields where we might see deer.
Is it time to go again and will you, with me.
It was an unexpected priveledge to find! the context for "It's context all the way down and stances all the way out." And I guess nothing is ever (resolving to) "nothing but this" (sentence). Except yet the sense of it, and the extent it can be seemed to, like suicide, certainly deserves that sentence. Thanks for the unfurling of leaves.
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