Begging the Stars for Answers

The taste of my lover on my tongue, always.

Apples so cold my teeth hurt.

Abandoned factory buildings on the edge of the city, driving past them, wondering if there are fish left in the ponds just visible in the distance.

Wanting more is not the problem, the logic justifying want is the problem.

So you see we are not actually going anywhere or moving or changing at all!

At night begging the stars for answers, then remembering I am past that now, and so sitting quietly happily in the darkness with all my loves attending.

Dylan’s Street Legal, a joy in the canon to which I came late, am still from time to time surprised by.

Between pine trees, a cardinal, and at last the willingness to let the red bird be without forcing on it my convoluted sexual theology and obsession with images and symbols.

To gaze is to live, to be gazed at is to die.

It’s minor, no big thing, but I do think about it from time to time, the way I cannot seem to make peace with bells, their relationship with hands, how certain women embody the conflict - and how hard it is to include them - bells and the women who ring them - in poems.

Everything corrected, i.e., everything accepted.

Local Greek festivals we haven’t attended in years.

Bald eagles at rest by the river, facing north from an honored hemlock.

Dad’s focus on trees and flowers, living things that did not speak or move, especially in the last decade of his life when so much went wrong. 

How tiny this cell, how fluid the calendar on which my death is marked!

This late interest in Madonna’s Hindu-influenced work, as if something inside of me is settling deeper than I realized.

The function of the holy relationship is to generalize so that you realize all your brothers and sisters are, in fact, brothers and sisters.

Playing with dogs, a joy I have almost forgotten, remember now and then with strangers mostly, a sorrow and more than that, nearly but not yet gone.

Stitching together a marriage on the outskirts of a desert I wrongly thought I had already faced down. 

Beginning to wonder whose baby I am for real.