What Yes Meant

Baby steps. Bordeaux. A sound our jeans make being drawn up across our thighs. Forsythia shoots leaning out into the narrow path beside the barn, brushed aside as we pass, later clipped and the clippings unceremoniously kicked aside. A sentence is always a form of repetition, always closing in on what something other than the sentence wants to say. 

Blackberries, raspberries. Sparrows circling the garden at dusk, diving and tucking, their white bellies flashing like bits of the moon being tossed by invisible currents. I was becoming a poet before I understood what being a poet meant and I said yes to the call before I understood what yes meant, none of which is unusual but still, it's helpful to be clear about what we are and how we arrived. Nothing left now but circuses, nowhere to go but the desert.

Footsteps in the hallway, our brain too tired to sort through who is approaching. Can I work "alarm" - let alone alarm - into this sentence? Memorial services for strangers at which we nevertheless know to bow our heads. Let's get dialogic, let's be that strong. 

Smoking cigarettes in the Italian countryside in 1989, staring at grape arbors ascending steep hills, the hot sun intimating joys I would not know for another five years. Ideals are the death of love but love is the father of ideals.

Old ladies who talk a long time about their grandkids and great-grandkids, how sweet they are, how often they visit, and who is the author of all this again and what do they want.

Hot air balloons and how they have functioned as symbols of sex and romance in my life. The whole place smells like a dentist's office, and I begin to hurry accordingly.

Who says it will only hurt a little? The daisies this summer showing mostly at the edges, sturdy but scarce, like ghosthunters, or whatever ghosthunters find when they don't find ghosts.