Remember the Woman

There is something in the grass, moving between rain drops, heading for the taller grass where in May the peonies will bloom. 

Peonies, blue flag, tiger lilies.

People leaving stuff out on the curb for free - pool ladders, kid bikes, old windows, mason jars. But dandelions are always free, cries the man for whom arguments are often the only way to know he still has a working heart.

Washing my thumbprint goblets and putting them on display in the kitchen. Reading a mid-fifties Betty Crocker cookbook, happier than I can say with the drawings of happy families in it.

Still from time to time listening to Human Sexual Response because a babysitter on whom I had - and, in some ways, still have - a breath-taking, knee-weakening crush mentioned really liking them, wanting to go see them in Boston.

Thinking of the various deaths that came near to me - especially in the mid-seventies and late eighties - but passed, taking others, often painfully, who watch me now, shades in a well-lit place.

Rooster works out his maleness on a low limb of doomed hemlocks. When you see a cardinal, will you ever not remember the woman who taught you to see God in all things? 

Baby rabbits, robins. A slate gray sky that reminds me to wonder what memory is for. How much of my spirituality knows itself in the relative minor!

How confused I was between the ages of six and fifty-three! Cutting limbs on the ornamental birch tree, the stumps leak efflorescent sap, and I press my tongue to the rough wood and lick and swallow the cosmos. 

That was Saturday I think. Making love in winter by the fire and after sharing an apple, wrapped in blankets, working through our unwillingness to go back to Foucault's History of Sexuality. 

Two cups of coffee into the sentences - the part that's supposed to be ten thousand septets - and all I can write are lines from Bob Dylan songs that I loved, driving around Vermont in the late eighties with my heart broken, whatever that means now I don't remember what it meant then. Speaking of which, the stairs in the barn going up into the first landing are getting wobbly, do you think you can fix them?

Sleeping on the floor, wrapped in an old quilt, talking myself to sleep, happy in the old ways, the ways we didn't use to tell about.