How to Beg

She is lost behind a window. Dim light waking up. I make coffee, take it to the bedroom, drink it while she sleeps, her dreams a tangle of dark vines just above her head. Oh Jesus, make me better than I am, I don't even care about heaven, just don't want to bring so much suffering into the world.

Was told often to listen, and did, and judged what I heard, which I don't think anybody planned for. 

George Winston songs, Goa Gil songs, Johnny Mathis songs.

Morning passes reading the news, too tired to write, but then abruptly writing in the old way - clear and hot, beyond the reach of any editor, the cosmos in the sentence like a sweet seedling rooting. Problems as a way of looking, i.e., would you like to change your mind about the Lord? When the moon is full I go outside, wander past the horses to the river, slipping on thin ice, the old one-man church still welcoming me. We ate donuts with black coffee, smoked cigarettes and wrote poems, and just generally celebrated the wordiness we'd been given in Creation.

Unable to sleep I go downstairs and pace, hands folded like a monk, rehearsing a speech for God (do you have a throat by which to strangle you), who I expect to meet any day now. Winds so strong the house shakes. I said "leave me alone" too much to people who were only too willing to let me go.

How many words equals a poem? That year driving back and forth to Hartford to work, writing sonnets in my head to pass the time, then before bed writing them out in a notebook. It matters, what you choose to read, because what you read is reading you, nobody wants to see this.

Was I without shoes all these years just to learn how to beg?

Unexpectedly on top, her left hand holding my left shoulder, her right hand trailing up and down my spine.

A tenderness begins to appear, a silence that wants nothing but to extend itself through me to the world. We let go of the wedding, we let go of the marriage, we meet each other out back in the windy pasture, yet-frozen snow, the Goddess we do not name speaking to us in low tones, making us a chapel for Her flame.