Food to Rule Over

Begin with weather: mist rising in the horse pasture, ice slicks up and down the back roads, and the river moaning under plates of gray ice. All the purple loosestrife on the side of the highway in New York, and how happy I was to be driving west with her, professing my love in all the ways I knew how. The weddings in those days, the marriages. Tom McGrath poems, especially The Sound of One Hand Clapping. The sadness one feels when realizing how broken their models were, and wonders is it too late to do better? Photographs from Ukraine. I was hungry a lot as a child, there were rules around eating I did not understand, and sometimes it didn't matter what the rules were because there wasn't food to rule over, and why am I just now remembering this? Clouds traveling slowly across the sky, something opening in me deeper than what was open before. Healing is just a form of falling? When bruises made my knuckles art. He had a way of looking into the distance that scared me, as if he were looking at some faraway battlefield, the blood and iron of which could reach us even now. Stars at four a.m., temperatures dropping. How much changes when we no longer turn away the coffin ships of winter. Something gold unfurling somewhere. Something empty filling with grace, the light spilling everywhere. Sentence lifted, promise fulfilled.