When Love is No Longer Consonant with Beauty

A break in the trees through which the river shines, deep blue and glistening. Bookmarks in Abhishniktananda's Ascent to the Depths of the Heart, life changing so fast you can't keep up. Kissing in the way back.

Asked by God: do you want to see me if seeing me requires dying and I answer "no" and my whole life finally settles into something clear and gentle and sustainable. 

Salting eggplant slices, making space in the backroom to store more potatoes. What will you do when you undo one button and I fall to my knees weeping with joy and gratitude?

Foxes pass through the horse pasture, fleet and lovely, not looking at us looking at them. Flames lick the sky.

We soften into one another again, grateful at last that youth is gone. All these gold leaves filling the sky, as if there were no other way to see anything. Here is where the coffee goes, here is where bowls for cream and sugar - the ones my aunt made by hand when she was seventeen and the neighbor taught her pottery - are kept.

The rosary I pray smells like a woman I kissed by a river a long time ago. 

Yet ask: what are lifetimes anyway? 

Chrisoula says "you should read this book" and I say "I just started watching the tv version" and she asks how it is and a few minutes after that she asks shyly will I start it over so she can watch with me and I start to cry, right there in the sideyard where we're talking I start to cry, I don't even know why exactly, it feels stupid but also so so good, and I say "yes, of course," of course I say yes.

A kind of writing one does when love is no longer consonant with beauty that the world calls beautiful. She says, "I never met anyone who cared so much about a single punctuation mark," to which I reply, not kidding, "a significant spiritual aspect of my life's work has revolved around making peace with semicolons." 

Trout leap into the sky, glide between stars, laugh at how delighted I am, as if anything I could do could ever have impaired their freedom. Rolling cannabis with yerba matte and a little lavender, smoking on the back porch in early September, wondering will the sex stuff ever settle enough for us to be friends.

Always ask: "who is we." You write these amazing sentences, I can't figure out your relationship with virgules, but your relationship with grief is so utterly perilous and also so visible and obvious that I don't understand why everybody isn't rearranging their lives to make you safe, give you time to do the work, write it out, et cetera.