After All These Years I Really am Shoeless

There were many shades of green that morning, and lots of unfinished poems. My daughter walks away with an umbrella, and I remember that photograph Dan took of me walking away from our apartment with an umbrella, and fuck if I don't still miss him. We kneel, we pray, we rise and bake bread by lamp light, we eat and give thanks for our eating. 

The point is, some things work and some don't, and it can take time and energy to figure out what. Greek columns on falling-down houses in towns where property values are all anybody talks about. Lack of epistemic humility is an actual problem, trust me. 

What if we hold onto our compass and chart, will that work too? The rain falls earlier than expected but we're not complainers, we're gardeners. I don't want to think about what happened to the chickadees who were nesting in the pear tree because they're probably dead.

What happens behind churches does not stay behind churches, as what we write in our early twenties does not stay in our early twenties. The ape becomes an angel who cannot for the life of her let go of the ape. Reruns again.

I remember he told me not to worry about titles, which confused and frustrated me, as I loved titles, felt like they were ermine stoles you draped across your poems to emphasize their divine, their royal lineage. Cross-stitch patterns, cannabis smoothies, unmade beds in which the various folds and wrinkles are like something out of Saint-Exupéry. Fanning ourselves with the missals.

Remember when Dad gave up on animals and also basically disappeared from your life? Trying to seek  the origin of a certain phrase she uses leads directly to the National Gallery of Ireland's show of paintings from the West of Ireland between 1800 and 2000, in which for the first time I see Mainie Jellet's "Achill Horses" series, in which, I can't say why or how I know, I know all the horses went blind after being painted. Kneading red pepper into breakfast sausage, talking about what it was like to grow up in Greece.

I wonder what meal was invented first - breakfast, lunch or dinner? There is a stone in my shoe, or else the laces are broken, or maybe after all these years I really am shoeless and this is what it feels like to die of love.