One Finds a Hill

Quarter moon just over the neighbor's house, swaddled in mist, yellowish, looking like laying down. Sheep cry out, crickets answer. Has anybody mentioned the lilies this summer, how vivid and luminous they are, semi-monstrous, like a non-famous poem by Sylvia Plath?

One does love a performance, is always angling for one, no matter how bored the audience or how constrained the material. Don't tell me you love me. Pumping gas in hot sun, everybody around me apparently happy, so much so I want to shout "what's the secret to eternal life" and see if anybody answers.

Crows atop the church steeple, a familiar staple of these sentences, as if I am trying to tell myself something. Formal dance moves once learned are hard to forget, God apparently partial to square dancing. To whom does night belong, in the end?

Storms pass but the possibility of storms does not pass. A certain move one has to make ascending the front porch stairs so as not to step on the clover. We watch turkey vultures pass, get into a long discussion how humans have never really needed to fear creatures of the sky but of the earth, yes.

A man I admire says "I wish prayer worked," clearly assuming I'm at best agnostic on the subject, and I let it go but wonder will I ever get another chance. The sound basketballs make being dribbled in an empty gym, a kind of metallic ring in the echo. The moon falling off low clouds, stars dull in the haze.

Going through Dad's old clothes, sweaters and t-shirts, a few button-ups, taking what fits and setting the balance aside to be donated. Forever shaking dust off my non-existent shoes. At last, briefly, the heat lets up.

Photographs of our wedding hang askew, I can't say why, nor do I right them. In the cave of the heart one finds a hill that has never been climbed and finds too the end of climbing hills and thus faces a choice, very much unlike the one Elliot posed in that stupid fucking attempt at a twentieth century love song.