Once Upon a Time You Wondered

Snow appears - high in the gray clouds over the flattened landscape - and I do not recognize my children.

Photos my mother cherishes, others that disappear, which she denies disappearing.

Bright red leaves on the neighbor's bushes across Main Street, intimating divine outreach, as if the angels were giving up on symbolism and just being plants. 

Patterns on highways, patterns in grass at the park where in morning I jog, muttering to myself about what went wrong in childhood.

Dangling modifers indeed.

Wind in the hemlocks, loosening tiny cones. 

I remember resting in tall grass. The lake spreading blue depths away from the cliff. What is utter.

What is lost, what is found. What does it mean to ask questions in writing, not because you want an answer but only to remember that once upon a time you wondered.

Decorative crucifixes made by hand in Jerusalem by old women for whom money is not the point. 

Wishing again. Following salmon downstream again.

Jeremiah pan fries the trout over an open fire - lots of onions and slivered potatoes - singing Tom Petty songs, his breath in the air a silver cloud I would make into jewelry and wear unto my grave, were such a thing possible.

Confusion again. The interior passages are untraveled mostly, yet this new lamp I am given makes a new journey possible. One is riddled - literally - with a desire for desires.

How I pleaded not to be hit and was hit anyway, over and over and over. Gifts that in the shadows look like something else.