Finding an Old Trap

What the pigs went through. 

First star, quarter moon.

Mallard arrowing up the river alone.

Growing up in a haunted house, never leaving it, nor being left by it.

Corn stalks, sunflowers. The marigolds this year.

Visiting the cathedral in which we were married, reflecting on an emerging understanding of what love is, entails, et cetera.

The tag sale. Come cries stifled at dusk.

Rhubarb pie with vanilla ice cream.

Leaves circling the sky, higher and higher, then settling in apparently random ways on the earth, as if there is no getting away, only leaving, this leaving.

One can be aware of bias, one can tell fewer lies, to themselves and others both.

Tossing hay to the blind horse, another summer over, all of us coasting now through asters and chrysanthemums.

Cleaning the attic, finding an old trap with a mouse skeleton in it. Gold ornaments hanging from rafters. What we find funny is less helpful than why we find it funny.

Denise Levertov's patience with my questions thirty some odd years ago.

All in now but on what.

Waking early with no desire to do anything but lie in the warm nest of the blankets and explore the range of this happiness I am late but not too late gifted with.

Life a study of pronouns, line endings, how a sentence is tidal, which is to say, contingent, and learning how to be okay with the way certain fairy tales don't end but go on in us, like breathing or psychology.