Moving in the Heavens

It will rain, they say. Night is a long time to be alone. 

What is related to solitude that I am not seeing and thus continue living in this pleasant but non-luminous mistake?

The roses being roses, the marigolds marigolds, and you making a vast poem of it all - sentences and lines, ideas and rhythms, you and not you - as if the cosmos requires admiration, or as if study and love are the same movement.

Something shifts inside, like a fist loosening, or a stone being pushed by frost heaves into sunlight. Bottles on the hayloft window sills filled with sand, stones, crystals and marbles.

And childhood lost in weeds and gravel, a road that goes nowhere and so isn't even a road anymore.

Hating the phrase "heart attack," a part of the family lexicon since before I could speak, always terrified that the essence of you - the engine making you go - could also go to war with you and win.

What God wants priests? 

Whisking Greek coffee right before it boils, not adding sugar. Parking in the farthest lots to leave space for walking. Leaves fall, one or two spiraling through moist air which makes me think of the soul again, an old dream that got me through law school and the early years of the marriage.

What is leaving, what has left. My mother and I sit on lawn chairs in the shade, talking about dragonflies and death. 

Headlights in the dense mist coming slowly up Main Street, a sense one is watched, wanted even. Ended.

Hemlocks draped across the damp flannel of sky, love letters rely on shared language to function. What a funny couple of monkeys we are!

What is moving in the heavens, what is born in you each moment, what is your responsibility to this habit you have of engaging with certain memories as if they're real. 

A dance, a duel, a dinner, a date, a dig, a dare, a dialogue.