Into a Soft Torus

Living in the fallen world, surrounded by angels.

At dawn the clouds gather into a soft torus and undulate above hills on the far side of which Emily Dickinson lived and wrote.

Mourning doves on rafters in the lumber yard's barn.

What if your Mom was a lightning bolt and every time she visited the world lit up electric and purple?

I roamed the earth until utterly scarred and ruined by lovelessness I could only crawl in circles in the dirt and whisper secrets to crickets.

Who interferes?

Who emphasizes littleness?

Chrisoula falls asleep after, holding my arm across her chest, and I lay there quietly, wide awake and thanking God. 

A dream in my early twenties of all the stars in the sky gathering into a three-masted square-rigged ship which I would one day board in lieu of dying.

The good news is not that Jesus is risen but that you may yet remember and live by the law of love.

A history of beekeeping intersecting with our perception of joy and peace.

Oh I am feeling the sweet prayer vibe now!

In the shadow of the barn, blue frost, half-remembered moonlight.

She said that if anything changed, she'd let me know and I never heard from her again: articles of faith. 

Secrets cats keep.

Driving the long way back from work in order to catch a glimpse of Greylock on the horizon, something wild in me surfacing at the sight of it.

A brief interval of homelessness in my early twenties that declines to be forgotten, as if I were in the proximity of a certain witch.

But how do we know that mirrors don't work without access to light (and is there ever such a thing as no light (and how do we see darkness))?

Reading Frank O'Hara poems on a bus to Vermont, now and then closing the book on a finger to hold my place (and gazing out the window at the shifting landscape), working out my own poems, loving even then the ability to efface oneself with words. 

Stunted juniper bushes just off the trail begging a visit, which I cheerfully grant, being more interested in healing cursed fig trees than in the assholes that curse them.