The Shelter this Life Allowed

Mist everywhere now, each morning a message, as if the cosmos were insisting on something hard to see but still lovely, even in part. Before anyone else is up I make waffles, eat a couple plain in darkness and leave the rest on a cooling rack. Love is as love does, apparently always. Grass just visible under melting snow. I remember the rickety architecture of roller coasters, I remember heat rising off the pavement in waves, I remember how there was not enough of anything ever. How beautiful the distance is, filling up with hills and trees, ducks and crows. Sex with satellites, main attractions, or just yourself. The neighbors invite us for coffee to talk about fencing, a production at odds with the simplicity of the ask. The stars are near enough to touch, we are in that specific sense the sky. Miracles are not a matter of belief but collaboration? This late bitterness, this childhood I wouldn't wish on anyone. Waking up periodically, listening to winter rain and Chrisoula breathing, the warm tent our bodies make all the shelter this life allowed me. Dicing garlic for the salad dressing, whistling a handful of songs my father enjoyed, ghost riders still loping over the transom, walking the line, hello darkness, et cetera. Deadlines, headlines, red lines. Finding my way by touch through an emptiness I did not ask for, just like everybody else. The wedding disappears the way the road disappears when you are no longer traveling, the marriage rises like a motel, broken neon vacancy sign, but for the next few hours, enough. Maple syrup kisses. I am still waiting on a letter from her, thirty years and counting, something something can we try again, this is not a joke.