The One You Want in Bed

Waking to geese passing at 5 a.m. or a little after, their guttural honking tearing a seam in the pale sky through which light pours, waking us.

I remember telling what's-his-name a few days after his ninetieth birthday that I was getting married to a Greek woman and he said very seriously "Greek women are the most beautiful women."

Yellow maple leaves sifting through moist air like symbols of the soul in a poem by a poor man's William Wordsworth. Just try not unlocking that heart!

Arguing cheerfully over how many notes are in a rooster's morning cry.

Remember Memphis? Remember the drunk preacher we beat up, how he sounded crying in the grass behind the sheep building where we left him, and how for years after, every time we talked, we had to talk about how he sounded, as if that was the only part of the memory that needed managing? 

As I was saying.

Bruce Springsteen on the cover of Darkness at the Edge of Town. Where the bartender knows you and says when you reach the bar, fuck off. 

Remember your first beer with your Dad? Remember how the calves gasped dying, and how the pigs screamed. Identity politics doesn't go far enough.

What's muddled, chaotic. First time to the gallows?

Sheets of music on fire when Jim Hendrix walks by. Places where we are quieter naturally - graveyards, churches - and places were our voices rise, like in the kitchen, say, or when riding horses. 

Giving away all our horse books, having reached that juncture where one no longer has to read in order to piece together what's going on. Yet at night when the others are asleep I go outside and beg the Lord to take my sight and restore his.

Early afternoon, slipping out of our clothes, getting in bed the way you get in bed when the one you want in bed beside you is beside you all the while.