Distances that Surprise Me

Mornings with the blind horse I try not to lose track of my grief but let it rise, tidal and clear, a Herkimer diamond in starlight. I buy Chrisoula a hand-made tea mug for Christmas, the artist and I talking after outside his studio about the old days, our sense that for all our particular collective gained, we've lost something too. Cold winds off the mountain, leaving the village darker. Who needs old men? My uncle used to sail for days, drinking and smoking, snorting cocaine, until lost and out of drugs he had to call the Coast Guard to bring him back to land. Always ask who is paying, always be aware that sometimes the answer is you, you are paying. Bleary with fatigue and the effort of not drinking (and confused by all the voices at the party) I start crying remembering an Irish Setter dead for fifty years and everybody in the room looks away, embarrassed. In the mailbox is a new life, isn't that what you always wanted? The clothesline groans as we haul it in, everything stiff with frost. Her voice recognizable at distances that surprise me. Sex at various junctures, strange women and familiar, real and imagined, all of it always opening lines of dialogue that spiral into the cosmos, wordy and luminous filaments of love. Losing myself in you, losing the church in you, wandering a long time in you wondering will anybody save me. Is now when I remember it's not a crime against God or nature to lay down, get quiet, die.