I remember fishing, sitting quietly by the river, attentive in the way one is when you are hunting. I watch clouds pass, murmur praise in broken Greek, I bring the blind horse to the fence line as by grace are all things possible.
Rain blown by wind into our face walking, making dialogue difficult. The strange territory of the monosyllabic.
Driving north into Vermont, third time since summer, my heart lost now, like a dog gone for decades, you can’t get it back. All the earth’s kings are wrong for there is only one Kingdom, and it has no ruler, only servants.
I talk a certain way about Jesus and loneliness, making her cry, and after want only to wash her feet. I remember coming to in Boston once, a basement apartment in which half a dozen men were playing poker, ignoring me in the corner, not knowing how I’d gotten there, not sure if there was – then or now – a way out.
This loveliness that transcends all light. Listen, if it can’t be put into words then it doesn’t exist, okay.
Saltines, soup. Ma calls, her voice brittle with anger, the struggle of her life, which became the struggle of mine, to which Fionnghuala has laid claim, brave in ways that my ancestors tell me is characteristic of our women.
Don’t blame me, it takes river ice a long time to break up too. A dream I am gazing at eternity and waking to realize while pissing that we are always gazing at eternity.
How happy we are when there is somebody beside us! An hour of the day when the Taconics are purple, not like the grapes of childhood nor Bacon’s screaming popes, but something quieter and deeper, like the river you are as it reaches at last the sea.
Lost again. For whom was I writing all those songs in my early twenties, why was it so hard to learn that art, why even now do I sometimes hum instead of talk, as if beyond the semantic verge lies the purer garden of simply rhythm.
Something Roman. You don’t profess, you don’t promise, you just go stand by the water and throw your bread, then wait on her to make up her mind.
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