More spring than winter, January trailing off into memory, a field of ferns in which dogs wander forever. Chosen but then somewhat oddly situated, reborn but only to face down obscurity. What is the function of the body, how does it becomes severed from the self, does it actually, what is really going on here?
Many memories of driving on Route 91, especially in the shadow of the Seven Sisters, several summits of which I hiked with Jake nearly daily for two years. Clouds bunching together, going gray, settling atop low hills. There have always been trails in my life, wherever I am, whatever recess or hollow. She straightens a little, lifts her hips - something delicate, deliberate, a calibrated grind - and comes hard. Detaching after sometimes more than we intend. It's true: when you have a dog your life changes.
Cold tea in the dark, looking outside at leftover snow pocked from a light rain. We die differently, is one thing that must be said about the age. Even poetry did not demand anything from me I could not cheerfully give, but you - you do. Still swings.
The river sings a deep song all night, while I go back and forth between visions. Wanting a woman in the barn again, on hay again, and after adjusting our clothes, breathless in gold twilight again. We went duck hunting a couple times, I thought a lot about Thoreau, gazing between slats in the blind at a cold pond nearly eye level. Guns do not go off alone, as Emily Dickinson made clear. Life in the euphemism, grace in the in-between.
Do you remember smoking on the shore of Lake Champlain, two or three a.m., the fires dead and the women gone, the two of us still talking about God. Men who survive, remember to laugh, can deal with ghosts, let the little things go.
Late morning, maybe the last one ever.
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