Jumping is a Thing We Choose

What shapes us? The neighbor's rooster sounds panicked, and briefly I am panicked. Shucking corn as an extension of prayer. In the morning we pick berries, cull fallen apples and slice zucchini to be dried into chips. "I am what I am" and "it is what it is" are hard things to mean, and maybe don't capture the whole truth but still.

Waves at a distance, whales rising. Suddenly this longing for snow accompanied by a sense that I will never see snow again. Coffee stains - concentric circles signifying a dirty olympiad - on the window sill by the chair in which I write each morning. Removing my belt, remembering.

Her blue shirt hangs on the chair next to my differently blue shirt with its missing button, except hers catches swathes of sunlight slowly ascending the bedroom wall and mine is dull, like an unused chicken shed in which ghosts reside, bitter and bored with their bitterness. 

How the pigs resisted, how the trout resisted, how the chickens resisted, and how here I am with my own resistance, which has mostly to do with refactoring what it means to be that which has a name for resistance. 

Jeremiah makes better coffee than me, which makes me proud. We listened to Infidels driving to the grocery store to buy pickling spices and didn't speak at all because given that record why would you? Cliffs were not made for jumping, jumping is a thing we choose, related to how we are always in language, and thus in ignorance of what cliffs truly are. 

At a late juncture realizing the type of gambler I am, and understanding as a consequence why certain women found me attractive. On the one hand, yes, they do let us just walk into town but on the other hand, we choose to spend a lot of time wandering lonely in the wilderness, making and remaking prayers, practicing magic, basically giving the best parts of us to the wind and the rain and the stars.

When once I wanted oxen, when once I could not see between the story I was living and the one I longed to tell. Let us visit a local lake and stand in its shallows and talk, and let our talking be an invisible shrine to Sylvia Plath, one that will linger in the air for centuries, and people walking by that space years hence will stop, look at the sky and for no discernible reason think "it is as if my heart / Put on a face and walked into the world." 

Sawing fallen apple limbs to cart into the forest. The behavior of swallows, starlings and cardinals in late summer, the sense one has that there is neither an end nor a beginning but only folds, a shirt falling forever, never reaching any floor.