My Falling-Apart Body

Falling behind and getting ahead are the same problem.

 

Unable to sleep I get up and walk around the house shivering, the blue light everywhere, assuring me my falling-apart body is neither a problem nor a promise.

 

Study what generalizes.

 

Spring flowers in the meadows in my mind which is itself a kind of flower in a meadow or else why do we fall in love.

 

He says to let all the labels go, even man and woman.

 

Fionnghuala listens to my argument for going slowly with respect to adopting policies for transgender athletes in the NCAA and basically stops talking to me for two days, yet another woman in my life unafraid to call bullshit. 

 

Missing the moon when the moon is not there is also a kind of light.

 

Making out under the apple trees, the fire sputtering by the raspberry bushes, some night last fall.

 

What Paul understood about Jesus and how he came to that understanding, i.e., find your own road to Damascus.

 

Jenny invites Chrisoula and I to kirtan in Goshen and we go, of course we go, and driving home reminisce about the article I wrote for Hampshire Life about kirtan all those years ago, how it was the last piece of serious journalism before I began teaching.

 

Dark roads between forested hills.

 

Suddenly all these donuts, reminding me of that lovely Homer Price story as a young boy and being endlessly fascinated by the surplus, mountains of donuts everywhere, an abundance that I could not understand, being already forced into a complex relationship with hunger.

 

How do you learn you are a body?

 

Tara Singh said to truly see an orange was to wake up, and he also said that he wished he could have watched Jesus putting on sandals, and in this way helpfully integrated A Course in Miracles with Bhakti marga, the way of devotion.

 

Massaging the small of your back after entering you, waiting for the correct rhythm for thrusting to announce itself.

 

This is what it feels like to make amends, to bring a new order of peace into our living, and I like it, I like it a lot.

 

At two a.m. or so I reflect on my death, the anniversary of which always passes without my noticing, as Merwin pointed out.

 

Maybe read Hesse again?

 

A single maple leaf – brown and brittle – tumbles across the road, reminding me of how my life has mostly passed.

 

I was on the Titanic, saw the inside of Gary Gilmore’s cell, and asked John Lennon for an autograph, you?