Crickets Fill the Night

A fine snow falls, then stops and begins again a couple hours later. In other words, we've been here before. Cardinals in the birch tree out back, the fence between our house and the neighbor's leaning more than usual. When will you visit again and will that visit be the one that reminds me why I am here? 

Notes toward healing. My turtle soul wants to burrow in the wet moss of your soul, go all the way down in the waters of you. A man who cannot sleep, whose aversion to balms is the undoing he selects for himself over and over and over. Nothing vanilla please.

Everything diamantine.

Plaster falling from the church steeple where for reasons we cannot discern the weathervane no longer turns but merely points north. There are all these transitions, there are all these chances to begin again. 

In my heart, crickets fill the night with song.

I know a taxidermist who dreams each night he is hunted. Like, who doesn't wear a mask?

We are butterflies pretending they are humans who are dreaming they are butterflies pretending they are humans.

It is stories - it is frames - all the way down.

A worthy priest disrobes at the altar. Every gesture my father refused was saved so that in the Purgatories he might drown over and over in a sea of unreachable hands. 

Neither sins nor errors nor even wounds: the world waits on us to learn this final lesson.

So far down you forget there once was up.