Right at the Dream's End

I'm a gorilla!

What I liked most about visiting the Boston Aquarium was the light, which was always dim, accenting how alien the whole experience was which, oddly enough, confirmed something important about the rightness of my life on earth.

Crushes include but are not limited to: Daniel Day-Lewis, Nora Joyce, Thérèse of Lisieux (the Joan of Arc photos) Winona Ryder, Scooby Doo, Zuko and Mai (individually and as a couple) Tom Petty in the early eighties and Helen McCarthy, who wore long white gloves and danced with me when I was five years old and thanked me for being a gentleman.

Think about how you pay to live on the earth, how you feel you are alone in the cosmos, and how most of your life is a tug-of-war between forces that want you poorer and lonelier and those that want you to wake up, be happy and hale, and help wake up the others.

Hefting lanterns, brushing away cobwebs: reading Emily Dickinson late at night. She observed a lot of ice in my attempts at fiction, wondered what my relationship with North was, and in a lot of ways I haven't stopped thinking about her since. Oh the garden my heart is, oh the salad of my mind!

Walking back from the park, side-stepping fairy nests, telling the Buddha "Dude, I don't care how many times you show up, I'm not going to kill you." Soup?

'S'up?

Well, the three maple leaves caught between the storm window and the wooden frame are becoming pale and crepuscular, like the bones of fish and still won't blow away. We are made to be accountable!

Waking up early, still dark, roosters hollering somewhere, wondering if it's too late to move to Vermont and sell hand-crafted rosaries at church fairs and chicken dinners. Watching youtubes of Ruffian and sobbing quietly so as not to disturb anyone/have to explain my grief.

The priest died of a heart attack because he was unwillingly subjected to a series of sexual confessions, each grosser and more dramatic than the last. Goldenrod before it blooms. Blue jays on the back porch roof, hopping back and forth, so pure and luminous I offer myself as a sacrifice unto the God in charge of Beauty.

In dreams lately my father appears worried about the kids, especially my daughters, and I reassure him it's okay, they're okay, it's all okay, only realizing right at the dream's end that he is blind and trying to find a way to ask for help getting somewhere.

Cloud scud over Ascutney, late Fall, snow squalls at the summit, my heart an iron box in which all my murdered ancestors compose poems for their killers.

Yeah, about that.