Narrative Recreates Everything

Hard winds I wish on nobody. I remember phone calls by the river, loneliness and desperation moving everything inside me closer to the sea. You say "begin" without actually knowing what you mean. Old stories.

Old monsters, more tired than you know, ready themselves to sleep. Emily Dickinson in the early 1860s, moonlight on her lap by the window where she wrote. I remember Christmas as a season of promise, premised on getting rather than giving, and I remember the cold distances of January in which it hurt to think. Bobcats, bear tracks, blowjobs.

Every minute knowing oneself in a familiar way that somehow includes an absence that is intelligent, covetous, angry. It does not, in fact, come down to the words you choose but every mouse does clean up when dropped in the snake's cage. I have done bad things, and love men who did worse things, and God will not forgive me, and yet. Counting headlights on Main Street after midnight. 

Remember drinking? Flames lick the stars. The helpfulness of maps is contingent on our ability to look up and also change direction. Confession it turns out just complicates things.

Yet in the farthest reaches - where memory dims and narrative recreates everything, mycelium-like - there is this love, this openness. Crows in me pulling apple cores off what in time becomes the soil in me. A binding confusion symbolized by cigarettes in Ireland, sex in the afternoon. This wind in me, these wasps.