I am telling you that Icarus did not die but landed decades later, tired and burned-out, on a beach he no longer recognized and this is that story.
This this.
Trembling in the dining room, unable to meet her eyes.
Sunlight on the replanted Rose of Sharon.
We stumble through an argument, both of us trying to undo our sense that winning or losing is still viable, it takes three days but we do it, of course we do it.
There is no other, do you get what I am saying?
When you lift your shirt, when briefly I catch a glimpse of your shoulder - that struggle.
Hours spent in prayer in an attempt to no longer feel the fear I always fear feeling.
I think of Auden writing "a boy falling out of the sky," and something happens in what I still insist we call "my heart."
Amends which, once made, need never be made again - that peace.
This is not the poem I meant to write when I began, but this is the poem I am writing - that is a way to think about writing.
Musical traditions in which drone predominates, especially those in the Mediterranean.
Dried zucchini soaked in salt water with garlic, mixed with cold quinoa.
I did not plan the eulogy, I merely spoke, and now I have no memory but of that moment when I choked briefly looking down at the coffin I could not believe contained him.
Our shared body as yet untouched, as yet unkissed.
Cirling the lake talking about what we thought the marriage was, and how it was not that, and how it is this: circling the lake talking about we thought the marriage was.
We are all hungry for the witch, what else did we think was going to happen when we banished her?
Coffee mugs that are always empty.
It occurs to me as I leave that this is a pattern - I am always disrepecting the art somehow, always ignoring the work, in some critical way I am always refusing to be a member of a community.
One breath follows another until suddenly they skip - slow - and then no breath at all.
We talk over each other, it's okay, what matters is we are here and we are talking.
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