Death Breaches the Calm

Spring frost already collapsing to beads of water bright with sunlight. Lilac on the far hill, blurred by distance to a degree that makes my heart ache for something it remembers once loving but which no longer has a name. Well-fed robins - is that a thing - paired up, watching me pass. The inclination to take pictures is mostly gone, not unlike my interest in sex. Lost dogs trot happily beside me, then turn back to where I can't say. Death breaches the calm and we become religious in an instant. Farms described now as tax write-offs. "I love snow," she wrote, and they altered it, making her sound more pious and circuitous than she was in fact. I'm okay, you're okay, is not the worst way to begin a dialogue (or to end one). Morning rosaries, morning ambles. Jeremiah and I debate the correct pronunciation of "casein," then listen and realize we were both wrong. Morning coffee in the upstairs rocker, somehow elegant, somehow a joy. These are not the sentences I intended to write when I sat down to write - these are the sentences I did write. And begin.