A Plastic Rosary

Desolate, bereft, without consolation, or else it's pantomime, masklessness is the mask, et cetera. 

I read a Holy Book once, it was pretty good.

Something insists on us.

I remember falling in love with nurses in my mid-twenties, working through law school at the hospital, shifts at odd hours, blowjobs in supply closets, sharing coffee in the mostly-empty cafeteria or out front on wooden benches, dark all around, the beginning of a long and troubled sleep.

Childhood is a plastic rosary, blue for boys, pink for girls, black for the ones who will become soldiers.

The sun rises behind banks of low cloud, mist hangs still and low in the meadow.

Her dogs bark and growl as she passes, and I don't want to talk but she stops to talk, and briefly the heat of mid-summer is more oppressive than I can stand.

What do you call it, this honey-colored quartz, and why am I always wishing for names but also oddly not bothering to learn them.

A package of cigarettes.

Glow-in-the-dark bones.

Plastic whistles in the shape of birds that you filled with water to get the right trill.

Feet up on the chair to write.

A catbird hopes through the ferns, aware of me as a danger, a nontruth I cannot convey.

History is too much, all those beautiful stories fighting the weight of facts.

Imagine grace were the top button of a winter coat and it's always cold.

Chick peas with tomatoes and onion.

Cauliflower dipped in teriyaki sauce, eaten standing in the kitchen, talking about our youngest daughter's passion for gardening.

And the coffee gets cold while I write but it's that kind of poem in that kind of life. 

He did not rise from the dead and yet he is here, and that fact is more amazing to me than if he had actually risen from the dead.

Back to Abhishiktananda, the luminous spiral tightening, or am I being gently held now the end has come, over and over reminded it's okay to say goodbye and go.