Her Bag of Black Stones

How the moon confuses me in my mid-fifties, never where I expect, staying full for days, sometimes coming close enough to touch. Magic has always been a question of what works, and being able to make things work assures status. Spider plants, their pale green fronds falling for days. Making sense of Jesus seems to require understanding his commitment to itinerancy. The culture lives in us as we live in the culture, there is no free will anywhere.

This going nowhere vibe intensifying. We make noodles and eat them with leftover broth, a kind of beautiful prayer between us. Homegrown weed. Shadows cross the far wall as the sun appears between snowy hills. What you say matters less than how you say it, and how you say it reflects either fear or love.

The sea rises in me, my untethered heart floats far away, a dromon. Bunches of roses. Trailing my fingers along the mossy surface of ancient maple trees, learning something new about time that has nothing to do with birth or death. Strangers on the road, asking only to be left alone. "Bothamley catalogues more than 5,000 theories belonging to twenty-eight very different fields of study."

Breakfast in diners we will never see again. Family is an idea, there are others. My whole life basically a compensation for not knowing how to talk to people. An old woman with her bag of black stones walking through the Heavens. So much depends on attention.