October Skies Taking My Tears

What is female anger?

A cardinal passes in loping flight across the corner of my vision, pausing on a fence post, the slivered moon rising off its left shoulder.

Scrambled eggs, letters, sentences, lives. Between the river and the path to the river, between the mountain and the shadow in the valley that the mountain casts on such and such a day.

Try to remember what was before - before Easter, before longing, before the brutish howl in this inevitable and undulating void.

Credit where credit is due Hayden Carruth, Wendell Berry, Robert Bly and Jack Gilbert.

Black bra straps just visible making conversation slippery, as if something better were always lurking just off to the side, and you want to topple - tumble - into it.

Crows in the graveyard, facing the church, silent for once. The apple tree branch that fell earlier this summer has become a signifier - wholeness is the message of its brokenness.

I, too, am waiting on a miracle, as others wait on certain kinds of kisses, and others yet on something inexpressible yet realer than kisses or miracles.

Remember maple syrup drizzled on snow - a bite of pickle, a mouthful of caramelized snow - all of us laughing while the adults drank whiskey, sunlight sparkling everywhere, even on our tongues, as if childhood were a country one didn't have to leave.

Well, I remember singing Patsy Cline songs with Kirk on Lake Champlain, both of us drunk and stoned, in ways closer to the stars than I ever would be again. 

Where we go when our going is not filtered by our inner parent, critic, priest, biologist or law professor. Hot air balloons lifting slowly into October skies taking my tears with them.

The river is cold but hell if I'm not still crossing over.

What's your favorite war? The two rest stops in Vermont - both heading north - where I once had sex, rushed and breathy, and afterwards kind of embarrassed, the loneliness deeper than I was capable then of saying.  

No more familiar sorrows. Hell is knowing it can always be worse. 

Leaning out, not leaving.