What a Wasp's Heart Feels Like

Everyone knows the sound a zipper makes!

Going through old tools - wrenches and pliers, chisels and gimlets - most rusted beyond rescue or repair - remembering my father, who could not throw anything away. Stars fall in the tall grass beyond the meadow and glisten there in rain. One wakes early to bake bread, sits quietly in the kitchen, loving the way a sentence becomes musical.

Would you know me. Cardinals on the compost where yesterday I dumped whey. I wonder what it's like to not be wondering all the time. 

This is what a wasp's heart feels like, maybe.

What's a seven letter word for "happiness I'll never know again?" Carefully slicing dill pickles for the salad, carefully slivering radishes. 

I mean in many ways I wish I was a Buddhist but I'm not, I'm just a Christian with a lot of Buddha statues around his little farm.  

Certain hills in Vermont, certain dog's graves.

When it rains I am happier than when the sun shines, I don't know why, I think it has to do with having more time to read. Make a list of books that changed your life, then leave blank the number of lines representing how many more books like that you think you'll read in your life.

Grilled hot dogs, ice tea, Cape Cod potato chips. Lies we tell our mothers. Jasper goes into a long diatribe about THC content - how it's measured, why it matters, and how nobody really understands its relationship to the cannabis experience et cetera. The kid next door makes little abstract clay sculptures and leaves them around the neighborhood. 

Poems that leave you breathless, poems that make you want to travel a long way alone, poems that make you shake your head and say thank Christ it didn't come to that.

Oh, sleeping on the back porch, listening to owls across the river, wondering why I had to be so damn confused in this life, and yet so happy, if only at a late juncture.