Our Responsibility for Being Beautiful

This is the ninth month, this is where we are now. Mistaking shelter for home.

And leaves turning at the tops of trees. The last of the apples turning soft in cold grass.

Bear heart, elephant heart, trout heart, and all the other impossible hearts, and the one heart that holds them. Sunlight translated by a prism into beauty is a lie we tell ourselves to avoid our responsibility for being beautiful. 

Getting high alone after midnight, sipping coffee in the dark kitchen, arguing with myself and winning, that old unsatisfying pattern. Side-stepping a conversation that pointed dangerously to Dad's guns.

Lamps which no longer work. A new dream of living alone, only sometimes visited, and even then only for what can be labeled sacred.

Beyond the moon stars, the space they make possible, and the darkness, and this new happiness beneath them. One day there will be no more chickadees, and one day after that there will be no more memory of chickadees, nor any record of chickadees, and then what.

Consciousness dissembling in the vastness, not at all concerned for itself. Towering marigolds.

Decisions the body makes for us, and how we sometimes push back, always because we are in the throes of a story we agreed to be part of before we knew what agreeing meant. How when my uncle fiddled we all listened, his hands shaking which I thought was fear but was alcoholism, and how sad he looked after when we all clapped, which was both a mirror and a curse and I damn well knew it.

Back pain, headaches. The neighbors say nothing about the dog, and sometimes I see it tied by a rope to a maple tree, and my sorrow and pain expand then in ways I would rather die than feel.

Forgetting some of the rules, intentionally breaking others. The old apple tree mostly hollow, missing all but two branches, and still each morning I am happy to see it, my ridiculous heart opening as if its poverty could comfort anyone.