Out of the Garden

Shades. The Dead. 

What else, if anything.

How he looked laid out beneath the stole my mother's sister made him. 

Marriage vows, ordination vows.

Late afternoon I drift away from books and writing and wander up Main Street, over Route Nine, onto Fairgrounds Road running off into the forest. Liquor bottles in fallen leaves. 

Deer tracks gouging roadside sand, indicating a hasty - probably fear-filled - leap.

Quartz jutting out of the tall grass near the garden after two days rain. As well? 

Ah well.

What am I not noticing? What savior is wandering lost, hunched over in some alien landscape? The chickadees I mean.

Fallen fences. Irresistible symbolism resisted at last. To talk at all really.

When "your place or mine" becomes "our place" and then the end of pronouns altogether.

In a dream I put my arm out for an eagle and he came to rest on my arm to the surprise and awe of all save me, who knew that it would work, ordained the way it was.

For he is light and so his burden is light as well.