Not a Bad Life

Waking early to kick the furnace, make coffee, mutter and stretch. Not a bad life - is that why suddenly I don't want it to end? Pace crusty snow in starlight, the indifferent stars, wondering how come nobody told me it's all okay? Moonlight whispering maybe because you knew all along? 

Why do I have to do so much of the work alone, and what else am I not allowed to say aloud? Listening to Blood on the Tracks with Jeremiah driving west, happy in a way that for most of my life was mysterious, alien, or plain inaccessible. Deer in the far field, crows in trees, perched on guardrails. Near the Windsor line a mostly-crushed fox. John Prine sings summer ends so sweetly I choke back "no shit." Bitterness becomes you, be gone. Nothing real can be threatened, nothing unreal exists. 

What happens in the middle, what is balanced, balancing, what balances. "You don't have to be alone/just come on home." What happens when you say what you know? Wapnick telling everyone be true to your own truth. What happens when you stop cycling through crucifixion/resurrection? Karma is a cat, remind me again what the collective is. 

Pretty skies at dawn. Horses with frosted faces nudging the gate for hay. Heart breaks, heart heals, Love holds everything. What did we have at the beginning that we no longer have? A love that is impersonal, vast, that is the absence of exceptions. Including the exception of us at the beginning? For once not dreaming, for once not waking tireder than when I went down. Clouds bunched on the horizon like roses, gold filament, black bears rolling over in the cave. 

My steadfast Eve, our exhausted Eden. I work hard, who knows this, who helps. Chrisoula cries past where the fire goes. At last it is clear. Study zero, see truth, be not confused about love. Love.