Almost Naked Poets

My ankle gives way to the steep riverbank and I am reminded that the body sometimes must practice a surrender to distance. It's time to change my shoes because the journey's end is unseeable; a preparedness may be in order. There are trails I know by heart and there are those that lose me. Either way, one must walk. That is the gist of what these mid-summer days say in their sea-green hearts of shimmering haze.

In the shed at the bottom of the black pail, a dead mouse. The absence of life is a lapse in memory. Or so one says who cannot remember being born or anything that comes after the nowness of tiny burials. Are we really as blind as we think? The lesser light of dawn and twilight pierces my chest and pulls it towards that embrace we cannot call up with mere grammar or paragraphs or jots. Of course I am babbling with the current!

It is worth considering that the more she reads, the more she must hang in the wind like a kaleidoscope kite, lifted by the accord of breezes. Perhaps it is better to think on the flight of birds or butterflies which weigh the given lift, yet move with intention in the direction they must go. For now, the scribbles of almost naked poets carry on into the full, wet air of summer's work.

On the day of rest, I watched three minks hopscotch the rubble near the shore. Play and hunt. Work and live. They know nothing of preachers or church. Yet they make holy the everyday manifestation of what each is made to do. Everything else is just a different sentence saying the same sacrilegious thing: love remains.