Platitudes that Serve Nobody

My secret plans for escape always half-hatched. A hat made of live starlings, sometimes lifting into the sky and dispersing, sometimes settling on my skull, fluffing and ruffling and cooing. 

I set a bookmark in Abhishiktananda's Ascent to the Depths of the Heart - a thin white ribbon - a passage I wanted to study later and now for the life of me - gazing at the indicated page all morning off and on - cannot remember what there moved me. In the far field in Goshen - just across the town line - two deer.

We argue in bed, end up cold and distant all morning, working around - waiting out, really - our mutual disappointment. Mother's anger, always.

Leaves fall in the river, turn in gentle circles, float away in the shadow of low hills. This man who is also an egret, also a black bear, also a beam of moonlight.

Making coffee at four a.m., watching a strange light on the western horizon, wondering who else, if anyone else, is also seeing. Reheated Buddhist platitudes that serve nobody well.

Playing guitar on the front porch, Poor Wayfarin' Stranger and Back Home in Derry, Christy Moore versions which I learned in Dublin, a city in Ireland, which I really did visit. A sound the latch on the door makes being drawn close.

Lily pads, lozenges, Lemonade, Beyonce's. Where whoever painted the barn red ran out and painted it white.

New teaching plans abruptly scuttled, same old poverty grinning through thin soil, a corpse that won't stay dead. I broke down leaving the ER, sagging into Chrisoula, who said "you're okay" and nudged me upright, kept us walking, which is our thing I guess. 

I don't remember asking for the car on Fridays but I must've. Pockets of cool air, reminders that Fall is coming, and later winter, altogether reconfiguring my happiness set point.

Canning peaches. Rethinking Tolkien - queering him really - under the fierce tutelage of a daughter whose liberation I attended but did not cause.