Lonesome deaths on the highway. Morning filled with the aroma of skunks. When I began this poem I was unsure, now I am not. The river in winter, snow crusting its banks, impossible to cross.
Something lost because we reached for the wrong thing? I pick up a couple frozen turkeys at the co-op, tuck them away for later roasting. Screens ruined us says the man who has never said no to a screen in his life. Yet I remember that sliver of Lake Champlain, how blue it was in the morning, how bright.
It’s not hard to be lost. We say goodbye near the chicken pen, both of us exhausted with the world. Fionnghuala painted tea cups once, now she paints landscapes of graveyards. Those demons and their wretched insistence on being included in creation.
Tired too of the effort to make everything theoretical, as if mere transaction is beneath us. You can believe or not believe, which puts the lie to your Jesus. Trying to be gentle and failing yet again. Not star-gazing exactly, more like trying to remember something about death with my head tilted.
Shifts in emphasis. Promiscuous metaphors! In my dream, Emily Dickinson weaves a flock of sparrows into a vast, light-filled sky. Quieter than I used to be but not wordless, not yet.
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