The Most Devastating Riddle

Heart-shaped rocks. Suisecki. Is this the right room for the haiku workshop? 

Sleepy scarecrows, pie tin hands dangling in hot sun, I'm past fifty. A little something something.

Jasper and I study the old beehives and he says "you don't have to give them away" and I tell him in my heart I know he's wrong and he says "think it over" which is what he always says when he thinks somebody who's not him is wrong.

Persuading Chrisoula to sit on the back porch roof with me in late Spring, the moon floating through balmy skies, me on my back, head resting on crossed arms, she sitting up, holding her knees, looking mostly east where the river drones gently in the night. Remember stealing Dad's corncob pipe to smoke weed?

Trout leap where the river grows still and dark. I am no longer a hunter, at last I can say that.

Dad and I buried the dead calves by the grape arbor, morning after morning after morning, and we did not talk digging their graves, and that silence became the most devastating riddle of my life.

The King of Swords showing up too often in readings lately, which makes me double down on rosary novenas. Chicken carcasses seem to multiply in the freezer and our souls are infected with disorder accordingly.

Oddly I can remember literally every lawn mower I ever used.

The barns around here are like grandfathers, decrepit and disappearing, while grandmother energy lives on in quilting circles and gardens. We replant the horseradish root, we are not immune to therefores. 

Everybody teases me about the gourds and baby pumpkins but not about the glass gem corn, which is weird, right? A few of my favorite things include talking beside lakes while barefoot in the shallows, long drives listening to early to mid-seventies Dylan, iced coffee out of season, and Gertrude Stein's use of commas.  

I want to hate Valentine's Day - I profess to hate Valentine's Day - but I secretly love Valentine's Day! 

My heart is not a cairn but a messenger who's so happy he was chosen to carry a message that he's forgotten the message.