Snow is Finished Falling

Perhaps I will die on a winter's day. I miss small towns, and I say that as a man who lives in one, and always has. Let Jerusalem be a symbol, and hasten not to assign it any meaning of your own. 

Imagine those condemned as witches watching others hanged, awaiting their turn on the gallows. Granite lips of stone spitting late summer grasses.

Oh, God is joyous and also many butterflies at once. Continents of dust adrift in the bedroom, the window letting in an early autumn breeze.

Emily Dickinson's servants.

Snow falling or a little after snow is finished falling, the bark of the maple tree frozen and dark. Sleepy cats, tea steeping for hours.

Something electric snaps. The brain is a field of light. What the sugars do to you, what energy they evoke.

Long-suffering Irish stone-cutters, dark-haired selkies visiting the bay. There is never a time to panic. What is new, necessary, and what is never again.

Her jeans folded on the wicker chair beside the bed. Everything illumated.

And then I got used to drinking bad coffee, because it was cheaper and easier, and that was the requisite economy of discipline for the work I was doing, which was leaving lines for sentences, and otherwise consenting to the dissolution of the false. 

Sitting in Christ, haloed with starlight and violets.