Currents and Voices

In the morning after the horses I water the strawberries, fifteen or so plants that survived a rampant bull and then years of indifference to land in this new place. Jason and I talk about praying to plants, which he does and I don't, but not as a failure of love. Just be the observer you are, the moral being you are, the wordy project you are. 

Purple flowers under the birch tree, small cones that seem more focused than the leggy buttercups already making the meadow lovely. Swallows make a vast poem of the sky, a language I love and knew once, and now can only admire, as if the parts of me given to discursive thought are dying. When you go deeply into any saint's story it becomes psychological, hence the ongoing value of A Course in Miracles.

After her second shot Chrisoula is sick and I slip into the role at which I have most sucked in this life: nurse, servant, maid, assistant. Something is ending that has to do with a way of writing, and like in Scotland thirty years ago when it first happened, I don't know what's coming next, nor whether I will be the one to narrate it. Eggs with home fries and kielbasa, later a kale smoothie, and later yet peanut noodles with fried pork. Mint comes back, lemon verbena comes back, and the peas are tiny but not stillborn in chilly soil. What do you learn about yourself under the watchful eyes of cats?

The side yard lilac blooms, first time in four years, and each time I pass it, waves of gratitude rise up in the cosmos and flow through me like electricity or love. A quiet in which kissing you would last a thousand years. In the wetlands off Fairground road, a bittern, and further yet - where it's forest on both sides - a black bear, limbs tumbling as it crosses the road. We are falling, all floating, and somehow you remain precisely nearby.

Two days running sleep is not bad but more like waking every half hour or so, running through various aches, double-checking dreams for any useful information, and then going back to work. What does it feel like to walk through Paris with someone with whom you want to walk through Paris because I don't know. The river is currents and voices, and who does not not see, hear and feel this has not yet known the river. 

My dad's obsession with land, having enough of it and using it rightly, and the way this became my own - not obsession exactly but religion - no, obsession, obsession is right  - and what has happened to so many people accordingly.

What I remember from Kindergarten are the beautiful teacher's aides who came from UMass in tie-dye and flowing skirts, who put flowers in their hair during recess, and were always so happy, sometimes actually bursting into song, and I wish I could find them now to tell them that the grace they entailed and extended remained in my brain a lifetime, becoming a thread by which I found my way out of many darknesses and into domains of light in which it was from time to time possible to know the cosmos were a vast blossom, an undulating sea, a woman who is just happy to see you and says so, in ways that make you want to build a fire for her and tell a long story with a happy ending, over and over and over.