Walking Away from the Cathedral

Crescent moon, frost on the tall grass, I'm neither here nor there.

Memories of the wedding grow dim, as if we were running not walking away from the cathedral. Before the decision to write is made, what has to appear and to whom?

I did not ask for a heart yet I do not have to choose how to love – somewhere in that paradox is the secret to happiness. Vultures swarm my dreams, distant but clear. Something is drawing connections throughout the cosmos – the connectivity is accelerating - but when everything is connected, there is nothing to distinguish, and then who will give me a blowjob?

When I was little and got slapped the pain would crystallize - it was many lights, many points - and I was dazed by it, confused by how pretty it could be while also being so bad. A few weeks ago we cleaned under the back porch, wondered what the original builder intended for this space - no known photographs of this angle exist from when it was built. 

The canoe fills with rain water and fallen maple leaves, feral cats sip from it. You say my father failed me in ten thousand ways but you did not know my father, can you say that? 

Rivers murmuring all night in the dark. 

Women were easy in a way, men less so, but after a while even sex stopped working. Ambivalence about suffering is itself a form of suffering. Question: when did you start calibrating speech according to the gender of the listener? Who taught you how? 

Out back with the blind horse at dawn, sky lightening, choosing between sentences. Last night Chrisoula murmured another man’s name in her sleep, and I wondered if he was murmuring hers or ever had. Something hallowed in me now I no longer consent to be haunted by the invisble past. All night holding myself - and by extension you - tenderly, like a mother.