The Monkey who Invented Angels

The existential crisis goes with me apparently, even to Cape Cod, where the sea speaks of what is beyond death. What is pearl-shaped, palindromic, possible.

What is palatable.

Driving back from Dad's grave I always stop and buy McDonald's, as close to a sin as this life gets for me, but he always insisted when we drove together, it made him happy to treat me, it meant something to him in a way that means something to me, and for all the bullshit there was a lot to honor in him, so in this way I honor him. 

It does seem as if certain days are gone forever, like, say, last Saturday. Days later the kids laugh at how Chrisoula upbraided me over my nostalgia for tractor parades, repeating her taking me down, and I repent by accepting their teasing, grateful the Lord has not left me teacherless.

The side yard lilac blooms. My heart is not leftovers wrapped in foil.

Before heading back I drive forty or so minutes further east to that fish market in Eastham, buy clams and swordfish, bury them in ice in a cooler, and ferry them home up the turnpike to a half-assed clambake in the hills of western Massachusetts.

I remember going down on her at a rest stop in Vermont, the windows steaming, and an hour later - just outside Burlington - reaching a terrible loneliness that would stay with me for almost seven years, and that was the last time there was "sex in cars." 

Collectively we are the monkey who invented angels who proceeded to call the monkey forward into angelism.

Raspberry shoots in the fire pit.

Walking at five a.m., cold and alone, numb fingers working a child's rosary, studying a hill on the far side of which Emily Dickinson once lived and wrote. 

Baby rabbits in the bee balm. Our brains are being remade by the technology we made with our brains and it's not good, it's really not good. Feral barn cats scale the withered apple tree in search of baby birds. 

At a late juncture one realizes they are in dialogue with local rivers - that the rivers are speaking, their voices rising and falling - and thus becomes religious in a new way.

Sophia and I discuss the way that "reality is a social construct" can be a useful means of expanding the domain of love while Chrisoula listens, making dinner. 

I will no longer argue with you about what constitutes a helpful reading of Ecclesiastes, deal?

Take the sky, the stars and the moon, the sun and the ten thousand galaxies, these wings weren't made for flying.