Death Near the Marigolds

You are not your name tag.

 

Hills in Italy rising steeply away from the train, rickety frames supporting endless grape vines, predictive in a way of the Greek mountain villages that would later factor so intensely into the marriage.

 

Caring for plants, that specific mode of being Christian, which she understands better than me.

 

How not knowing the language is not an impediment to being happy, what that signifies and how.

 

This new way of wreaking havoc, not disavowed.

 

She snuggles in the morning, indicating willingness, and I am grateful and happy, but also curious about the Latin root for "friend" so sex has to wait. 

 

I miss summer crickets and even more I miss being far away from the village center, the sky different when you aren’t navigating so many unwanted light sources, seriously, what the fuck is wrong with us.

 

A year now since I felled a living tree, that part of the soul that dies when the tree dies slowly resurrecting as spring comes on.

 

Open windows.

 

Fionnghuala’s art on display at the community center, her paintings growing darker now, as she begins to see the nature of the world and appreciate – without precisely understanding – how she is the one doing it, and how people are frightened of her, and the delicate dance of letting her be alone with her art and also saying hey, I am here for you, want to talk, et cetera. 

 

Otherwise craving an epitaph.

 

Remember talking to other farmers after church?

 

Cloudless skies an invitation to clarify this evolving relationship with blue.

 

Trying to make clear that there is no such thing as justified anger, justified violence, justified war, and failing over and over and over, because you have to live it in order to say it in a way the other will realize is true, and as of yet I do not.

 

Hard dreams from which I wake screaming, cats leaping from the bed while I thrash, Chrisoula leaning over me murmuring, hand on my chest to soothe my chaotic heart, bringing me back to where there is less – not nothing but less – to fear.

 

There is all this death near the marigolds, I will never be free.

 

Let there be butterflies!

 

My ongoing discomfort with authority, mine and everybody else’s, the source of so much tragedy in my living.

 

How clear I was so early about property lines and acreage, ours and everyone else’s, Dad teaching me – as all fathers do – that size matters, of course size matters.

 

Reading books on hay bales in the barn because my mother wouldn’t go there, hours passing in gold light, the filament hues of imagination.