Our Dangerous Game

Familiar mountains. Familiar green of pine trees in the far field. What is this world but an echo? What is the mind but a cosmos?

Folding up old shirts, putting them into bags to be taken to the shelter on Wednesday. There was a story I meant to tell but did not, and now it will never be told, now another story will be told. I always hated the way some seals died, and as I grow older I hate it even more.

You think leopard skin is hot but why because it's not, ever. We work on paintings of roses - purple, yellow, blue, green - and all the while our mind tries to remember the name of her, the woman in Shelburne, Vermont who gave me a sprig of lilac I held onto well into my forties. The road out is the road in, this is a law.

Sipping whiskey in darkness, daring my father to appear, which he does not, knowing the rules by which we play our dangerous game. Barbara Deming essays, especially On Anger. Dylan is correct, mostly we just float.

Yet the coffee is hot and delicious, the co-op parking lot full of weary travelers, and I cannot bear how deeply I love the world, don't even care I'll die soon, it's enough, this life. We have to be born again, humbler than even a manger, and then God will show us the way to peace. Crows do not circle!

From the perspective of separation, it's hard to figure out what anybody means by Holy Spirit, but you and I are not separated! Warm maple syrup drizzled over homemade donuts. I'm not far away but I'm not near either, and the last thing I know how to do is move.

Navigating reunions and amends, as per the therapist's suggestion. A lifetime without the taste of you in my mouth is nothing compared to the moonlight I've been falling for all these years.