Forgetting as a Father Must

Hard winds blowing the turkey vultures south across the pasture, their wings still and clear. I am also the void, and at a late juncture, no longer resist it. Part of me was made for your mouth but the better part lives forever as what you call your heart. Breathe, child: I am going nowhere.

The ferns grow thick and deep, green insisting on being noticed. What else is the world? The apple trees collapse and I accept the wreckage as art, gently using a bow saw to nudge them into another something that will outlast me, e.g., fields of wild violets. You have to leave some of the strawberries or you are not properly harvesting. 

Won't somebody say what I cannot? Peonies falling over, petals blowing here and there across the yard. Nightmares again, carried into waking, Chrisoula refusing to sleep while I weep on the floor praying God will forgive my many sins. The stars are a comfort, as is the moon, but differently.

In crowds briefly seeing past the way we are all separate, then forgetting, as a father must. "Loving you isn't the right thing to do." So much seems to invite equivocation - can it be this is helpful or even right in some deep or cosmic way? Many cardinals taking me back to Denise, the red bird who destroyed me, leaving a mess no other woman ever matched or figured out.

At night - by a small fire - the kids gone inside - we touch each gently - all our errors dissolving in this late stage of marriage-as-love. Oh look at all the birds gathering in flocks! The blind horse cries out and Sophia says to me don't worry, and I watch her go into the pasture to comfort him, I see how she comforts him, and I wonder again how what goes right goes right apparently without me. I mean it this time: fuck that stupid cross.