Meeting Place of the Gods

The rough beast has reached Bethlehem, is moving on to Berlin. A quiet afternoon to myself for once, coffee and Freud's Civilization and its Discontents. "Oh yes," she murmurs as my index finger glides gently along folds to the meeting place of the Gods, the two of us praying in the oldest way known. Late but not too late the mind begins to empty, even of poems.

Rattling around on old bones? Framing the inquiry to subtly influence the answer is not the answer. Awakening in the Cambridge Public Library, Varela's ghost nudging me outdoors, into whatever the 1960s became. You took it because he gave it, but then you left and fought a forty-year war nobody knew about, a war to end making others take it on your account, and you won my brother, you won. 

Dim light in the bedroom. Sex in our mid-fifties, a kind of quiet journey up a mountain where Christ waits, sipping tea from the cupped hands of a widow who knows from service, fucking and death. Or this maybe? Rats in the hayloft scratching at 4 a.m., infiltrating the contemplation, reminding me how far we have to go together still.

This sentence does not solve the problem of capitalism and Christianity, themselves foot soldiers in the yet-rising tides of patriarchy, but at least it doesn't kid itself what the problem is. The Witch of Bantry Bay, straddling me by a small fire, her nipples dark in the shadows. Leaving the world by the obvious road? Your letter arrived yesterday, wine stains on the envelope.

When the kitchen smells all day of bread. We visit Starkey's, look at the pregnant sheep, leave without buying, say nothing anything driving away. A long hill that one does not ever quite reach the bottom of. What we put up with indeed.