A Flake of Snow Once

Christmas lights strung across beams in the hayloft, twenty or so glass bottles full of rocks and marbles and crystals, and my collection of oven mitts. Who have I disappointed is never a hard question to answer.

The middle of me grows dark, as if a brook were entering the earth, no longer able to reflect the sun. Dragonflies in late summer, high up in the hemlocks.

And so at last I break on the stone wall of forgiveness. Crawl into mushrooms and sleep the sleep of the dead.

What do you care about most? I remember sitting quietly by an open window overlooking Church Street, gazing at people passing, knowing their lives were rich and full and forever beyond me (thought in an early failure of love, this did not prompt me to ask what I was).

The energy body wakes up but like a toad in the garden. Ripples when we kneel to touch the lake to see how cold it is.

Nobody wants to hear about love. Leaving the bedroom at five a.m., exhausted and confused, in need of prayer.

Late fall roosters casting their spell on the sky. For I was a flake of snow once, high above the sea and then I was the sea.

This sentence replaces the sentence I promised I would not write. The thing about ghosts is that you are haunting them, not the other way around.

You throw yourself against the flood, as Jesus did against the cross, and for what. In my dream the roller coaster was covered with vines, each one of which had dozens of tiny roses on it, and it was dusk, and I was alone.

Years later remembering what you forgot to do for a woman in Ireland whose name you have now forgotten. This drama, does it ever end.