Through Rough Forest to a High Pond

Some things I don't want to say. Wandering around at midnight looking at moonlight on ferns. It's not fireflies we admire but the darkness they're up against. You wonder sometimes who invented stairs. Bear skulls with bullet holes in them, that sadness. Hike a couple hours through rough forest to a high pond I camped by as a kid and stand on its banks, knowing full well I am a turtle dreaming he's a man. And sunlight streams through rustling maple leaves, and atoms of the sunlight are not separate from the atoms in my blood. Walt Whitman lost now in a handful of photographs and countless library shelves. Rainbows grow dim above the river and the afternoon lengthens in a way that makes breathing difficult. Peonies and blue flag, honey bees circling. We take our coffee to the little table under the birch tree and sip quietly, not talking, letting the morning be morning without interference. I dreamed I was talking to Thérèse of Lisieux, trying to explain something about the Diana Vaughan affair, how I believe it affected her, especially the spiritual crisis of her last year, and she listened while curling daisy stems around her ring finger. Lucifer visits the day after failing to ruin me, and sits quietly on the bed while I write, humming a song we wrote in my early twenties entitled "Somebody is Lonely, Somebody Wants to Die." That train we're waiting on is almost here.