Month: October 2021
Beyond the Ability to Harm
Chainsaws drone a couple yards over, voices now and again rising to give directions. With difficulty, the writing is put aside. Last week the last Monarch butterfly rested in the spud garden while I dug up half a dozen rows, its wings slowly drying in the slow-rising sun. There are neither secrets nor mysteries, only games we play and conditions we agree to forget. Remember that! My heart is a Love Boat re-run, no better way to say it. Cinnamon raisin bread toasted with butter alongside hot tea. Ham dinners at the Congregational Church which we never attend, being given to something quieter, less social. I am passing beyond the ability to harm you, for which I am most grateful. Wind in the hemlocks, rain falling amid falling maple leaves. All this! A love letter one’s life becomes, late and unexpected, the familiar grace getting more so all the time.
Mirrors Our Minds can Be
Late October graves. Who will tell us how long the dead must hang before their bodies can be claimed. Leaves falling, apples rotting in wet grass. A sudden craving for Christmas decorations, moonlight on snow, the magnetic clarity of brandy, toy trains endlessly running. The Hall of Mirrors our minds can be. How certain of the dead were touched by frost before they could be buried. River notes. Notes to the dead, once elaborately written in crayon, are now hasty I love yous scratched with whatever pen or pencil was at hand. One is never not asking how Emily Dickinson handled this or that interior way station. No wind but a cold like the inside of iron. Tom McGrath poems at the wedding, one of the last times I knew the audience. Crows flying against the wind, high up, their cries a kind of warning. All these languages barely remembered! Going outside at dusk to listen for the river, that moment in darkness when its song is restored to the world.
Atop the Low Hill Sighing with Happiness
Through Deserts Others Insisted I Construct
Frosty morning tossing hay to the horses, sun not yet peeking over hills (on the far side of which Emily Dickinson lived and wrote). Tilting my head so the waning gibbous moon is hidden by the decrepit – yet still fruiting – apple tree. Chickadees singing on a pile of junk wood past the garden. Neighbors exist to remind me my heart is not neighborly, life somewhat resembling a crossword puzzle, one I am determined to finish. Regret and restraint shaping (sometimes violently) one’s sense of what is possible, basically the reason I’m so often in therapy, i.e., help me tell a happier story. My daughter’s paintings everywhere, a sense of world emerging through them that is beautiful but less frail that my own reckoning indicates. Chrisoula asks me to wait on the dump run so she can go with, and so I sit with coffee in the kitchen later than usual, writing sentences (which, unlike lines, are always there to be written). What would a bell do at the bottom of the ocean is not a hard question to answer but in another sense, is impossible to answer. A friend asking me to clarify the blue light to which I respond – oddly almost desperately – place yourself in the presence of blue light and find out. The whole point of childhood was to reach the books of Tolkien, which settled so much of my fear of evil, instantiating a long aimless walk through deserts others insisted I construct which I am only just beginning to understand can end whenever I choose. What I’m saying is, no more penance, no more “not yet but soon.” This heart, it asks for nothing but what can be given away, over and over and over.