In Greece in those Days

It’s never afternoon more than now. How happy I am in forever.

 

Other marriages, other weddings. Birch trees, their limbs widening, a gold light floating through the faint leaves skyward.

 

I remember walking in the forest, tracking a bear, my body changing as the forest deepened, as if what I tracked – lumbering in shadows – became me. The sentence is a prism and you are light, is one way to think about it.

 

Slow dancing, tucking her hand where I can kiss it as we sway. We became art consensually, no other way sufficed.

 

A crow flies away from me, angling a little where the tree line begins, and I swear it has eyes in the back of its skull and they are boring into me, naming me for whatever god comes after crows. Back when it mattered, being good at writing love letters.

 

In a critical sense, we are all food. Waiting for something to happen is itself a happening.

 

Going back through my notes from two years ago, wishing whatever in me resists order would consent to relax, let two plus two be four without triggering yet another existential crisis. Eventually it all disappears.

 

Wreckage. Dad and I spent years canoeing various sections of the Connecticut River, part of an abortive attempt to do the whole thing in sections which in truth I never cared about. 

 

I was happy in that little house farming, the woods nearby and the cows always happy to see me. There were troubles but if there aren’t how is it still a story?

 

The summer dress she wears, deep blue of the sea, nothing underneath but skin and heat, reminding me how in Greece in those days our love was ancient and getting older by the minute. These preferences, they are murdering joy.