A Shared Way Forward

When you meant to say plenitude? I take my old banjo to the front porch and pick clumsily at chords my fingers still remember. "Whoo whee, ride me high / Tomorrow's the day my bride's gonna come." Yet another patch on pants that Chrisoula says aren't falling apart but are fallen apart, a nontrivial distinction. Days earlier we watched a tractor parade, fifty or so of them grinding along Main Street under mostly old men, and I sank into nostalgia - a kind of loneliness premised on dishonest evaluations of the local past - out of which I was unceremoniously drop-kicked. Thérèse stood between worlds, floating, sharing in "the family life that never ends." We rue the fallen tansy, we plant and water the forsythia. I groan coming, shivering after, mind lost on back roads where warm beer greased a shared way forward, one I still treasure and from time to time travel. Coming to terms with how fucking scared I am of Emily Dickinson's mind. Ordering a clam roll with fries but no soda thanks, carrying it back to the beach and eating a dozen or so feet upwind of an old man fishing, the rank smell of bait not tamping down my hunger. As the old days are the new days and the new days old. Long drives back through parts of Massachusetts I never called home, fingering a rosary, cried out but not empty. What happens in the easy chair, what goes down in the clearing off the trail. We who are one with whatever is one with whatever it is that loves this this.