An Eagle or a Ghost

Basically, the thing at which I am good - arguing - is no longer needed. 

The surprisingly difficult question of figuring out whether we sex is learned or innate, which obviously revolves around defining desire.

Listening to the mechanic fix the car, eighties-era heavy metal muted in the background.

We who "get around to it."

Childhood was a forest in which many animals were lost and never found and - when one went into the forest to find those animals - one forgot what they were doing in lieu of simply falling in love with the forest. 

Or am I describing here a way of being in the world.

Letting dialogue be which turns out to consistently indicate a shared preference for silence.

Kissing Chrisoula in the garden, then taking pictures of kissing Chrisoula in the garden, and then realizing the question of who to kiss or why kissing at all has not been answered but effaced.

Whales in the moonlit sea. Tides in the heart as a form of obedience.

1970s "bodice-rippers" were an early influence, at odds with the power of the women in my life, but probably attractive for that very reason.

A sentence that contains multiple perspectives, points in more than one direction, moves you out of the text in which it appears, high above, like an eagle or a ghost.

My son playing my old guitars and my oldest daughter not answering when I ask a question about her recent reading of Emily Dickinson are the same happiness.

Mice happily nibbling bread crumbs we swept to the floor in disdain is the way of being Christian that I understand.

All the water used in slaughtering chickens, the afternoon becoming heavy in ways we did not anticipate.

Are we simply playing at establishing new hierarchies? Coughing at four a.m. in the hay loft, prayer an old man begging loose change in the subway. What we choose to leave unexamined.

An occasional emphasis on swans.

Chickadees resting briefly in the low limbs of the apple tree: summer is ended and will never come again.