I'm the Dad Figure

Lamentable Orpheus, unfortunate Lot.

Cars going too fast up Main Street with canoes strapped to their tops. I am the other side of the electron you keep trying to work into a poem. A sad sound the drain makes late at night, washing a few leftover dishes, hoping she notices, wishing there was something more to do. Ice cold gin-and-tonics out by the horses, then later on the front porch, passers-by stopping to say hi, what's up, did you hear about so-and-so, he fell down some stairs. Sometimes I feel like life tries too hard and I'm the Dad figure trying to slow it down, get it to chill out, play well together, find what works. Platypus, cannabis, Oedipus, animus.

Black bear loping across the trail, only glancing at us once to let us know it knows we're here. Fire licks the darkness and darkness comes, hard.

Settlement negotiations. Pretzel recipes. Unhealthy obsessions with kissing the leaves of the birch tree out back. We who dwell un-self-consciously in a map of the map of the territory.

Why yes my grandmother was a lapsed Catholic who collected ceramic elephants, why do you ask? On borders in secret. 

The conversation turned in the direction of a terminus which was undesirable and everybody noticed my desperation changing the subject. That apple wasn't halfway to the ground before I'd worked out the basic laws of physics that would get us into the twentieth century.

Cats tear the quilt my mother gave us to shreds. Ravens mock us from inside a stand of maples by the river. Decorative pheasants, dwindling faith in the efficacy of religion but otherwise okay.