On the Hayloft Floor

Waking to thunder at 1 a.m. - touching Chrisoula's shoulder - then going out to check on the horses, who bristle in the rainy dark but do not bolt. Yet later, from dreams in which the word "Aloha" predominated, the light was soft and the horses quiet, as if we had somehow stumbled into Eden. 

Chickadees hop in and out of a recess in the oldest apple tree, whose blossoms this year are scant. Do we know what we are doing when we seek to know what we are doing? I was bereft for many years but a quiet joy is on me now, like somebody has decided to anonymously leave a sandwich on my writing desk, day after day after day.

This writing. Dissembled guitars on the hayloft floor, my son's desire to penetrate to the heart of all objects to understand how they work. Metaphors work. Crucifixes made of dried palm fronds pinned to the wall, a kind of mindlessness that is not - upon analysis - unhelpful. Blueberries, strawberries, raspberries.

This is the world. Now this is the world.

Sex passes and then returns, a low fire in the gut instantly begetting prose poetry for an audience of one. Minnows flash in the shallows. Disturbing resting heron in the swamps off Fairgrounds Road, wishing it had come to something else.

High school friends who killed themselves. We are all drunks, we are all struggling with migraine headaches.

"If it's easy it ain't treasure" and other bullshit the patriarchy slings. Salads, sordid college sex stories, Saussure and semiotics. This would have been a hill I might've died on, were I the kind of guy who cared about dying on hills but I'm not, I'm another kind of guy.