The Concept of Rescue

Without lovers or followers, that desert.

This is soon.

Snow gathers on the empty limbs of maple trees over a century old. Nobody lives without a camera around here, the ghosts have become prolific but bitter. Sexual whispers.

Certain theories about cooperation that found a welcome home in me, as a drowning man reaches for flotsam, and then floats the swells for days waving at seagulls and distant ships, thus failing to understand the basic concept of rescue.

"When you write the word 'begin,' you are referring to the Country of Turtles, which is neither a place nor an idea, and which has no Queen, only infinite divine companions who are perfectly equal to you, as I, for example, was given to demonstrate." 

Context generates many demons, but others just appear - their source remaining obscure - and these are the ones you can't under any circumstances take lightly. Walking where in summer my children walked together talking about a future that would never arrive. Last of the violets, frozen but not unlovely in tangled grasses upwind of the apple trees.

Patchouli on the skull of a ceramic elephant. By mid-morning the weather changes, the sky dull gray, like a sheep's eyes after it's dead, or the underside of trout when it's too late to throw them back. 

There is no dream and also, this is the dream.

Arriving late to the "Emily Dickinson Atheist" party but nonetheless.

I have driven through southern Vermont so many times, on behalf of so many ideas about grace, never not in love, always resembling a creature in a snow globe, fascinated by the see-through skies and blurred gods beyond.

Meditating on one's skull, and on the dust which one's skull must become. Dry snow tumbling over flagstones out front, a softeness somewhere hardening at the bounce of each flake. 

Acceptance is the answer to all my problems save one.

The chess set my father gave me on which the jade turtle Chrisoula gave me now rests, gazing at the hayloft in which I work out salvation one sin, one blowjob, one sentence at a time.

I know I know: begin.