Crowns that Bound Us

Used to resist that feeling of dissolving, don’t anymore.

 

Lily pads. Throwing a stick for somebody else's dog.

 

If you don’t get how your ancestors worshiped the sun, if you can’t see a way you could easily worship with them, even now, then your study is not finished.

 

Steaming trout so the meat flakes off, mixing it with potatoes and onions, remembering how Dad would add a little beer.

 

She used to watch my little apartment at night, savoring glimpses of me through the window facing Church Street, I didn’t know until fifteen years later reading a poem in I think Rattle where she used the image of me she’d always used when we were together.

 

Hanging the laundry outside, wind making the sheets rifle.

 

Daffodils on whose petals of light I am borne forth into regions of heaven heretofore unnoticed.

 

In my heart the seasons change moment by moment.

 

Imagine seeing the world as Emily Dickinson saw it.

 

A woman who can live the mythology with you, live the fairy tale with you, all the while not losing the specific co-creation of marriage with you.

 

Pausing near the cattails, remembering early shooting lessons with Dad, not liking the heft of the gun nor the sound it made, but grateful for his presence, how near he was to sheltering me in that moment, how he held his body near mine in a way I understood was - in a barely recognizable register - love. 

 

There are no instants. What will roses look like in a thousand years, where will the cardinals live?

 

How hard it is coming down from the perilous heights to which I assigned myself, puer aeternus-like, a little prince, and how Marie-Louise van Franz saved me, despite her own confusion and fear.

 

Killing pickerel, killing catfish. Golden eagles circling the distant hills, hunters but also just "hunger organized." 

 

Visiting Saint George’s Cathedral in Springfield with Chrisoula, remembering the wedding, how ornate and stern it was - the linked candles we held and the crowns that bound us – and how after during the reception we ignored everybody and just danced, alone at the party together, always our favorite mode.

 

Screens falling out of windows. Wind blowing last year’s maple leaves into the road where they linger a moment, directionless.