Fire Rather than Smoke

Sharp light bleeding off the edges of clouds themselves sinking like tired oxen into leafless hills. There is no cooperation without at least the illusion of the other. Blue prayer beads my wife bought in Greece before we met, a sorrow for me, brightly-lit.

We are compositions, seamlessly integrated into the composer's heart. Ask what you see when you are not using your eyes but your mind. Stars wheeling through the sky, now and then trailing off like milky dust.

I walk two hours up Main Street and into Plainfield, the cold become as still as the interior of a stone, flakes of snow drifting through the dark like planets. Spirals, spelling errors, Spanish lessons. How as a child I longed to break open quartz rocks to find the pure light, unmarred by contact with the world.

Blurred minds. We are fire rather than smoke, crackling above fast-disappearing logs, ash always a symbol of what we long for. What helps?

What happened? Reflections of Christimas lights in windows facing the pasture and river. Early maps of Cape Cod.

Loose folds of skin around her throat, stretching as she lifts her head in anger, a familiar look and way of being that's older than I am. How in my early twenties I would spend hours painting my guitar case - crosses, rainbows, flowers, furling galaxies, soap bubbles. At dusk the horse whinnies half-heartedly, less demanding and more just checking does his voice still work.

Creaking clothesline as laundry is brought in. But this is not a story, is it.