Punishment Mistaken for a Treatise

Chicken carcasses under the apple tree, abreast of unmown grass. The many griefs of the many Marys.

Starlight after the moon sets, here we go again.

Meeting the neighbors to corral another neighbor's loose sheep. All controversy is status-based, it doesn't have to be this way.

Forsythia blooms.

There are all these trails in the world, there are all these dogs, and yet I am alone and mostly lost, what gives. Stopping at that place in Shelburne for cider donuts and coffee.

Hills on which apple trees proceed in stately lines, roughly north to south.

Meet me on the Mohawk Trail. Days later my finger is still bleeding, is this what you want.

Communal crucifixion, communal resurrection.

A treatise on punishment mistaken for a treatise on parenting, how we were made monstrous thereby. Hungry kisses and then the drop to one's knees and then the offering, both ways.

What cannot be joined?

I dream of making love in a room in which a rainy umbrella is still open on the floor, I dream of being breathless in gray light fading. Wrecks at the bottom of Lake Champlain, each a testament to the defining failure of my life.

Borders, bastards, broadsides.

Watering pumpkin plants, watching the sun throw planar beams of light down the hill towards me. Almost everything is broken, almost nobody is evil, let's go back to the beginning, let's try again.