The Woman Tired of Lessons
/After two days of ravenous winds, two owls call out in the dark, undisturbed by the dog let out to pee. Their laments rise and fall in perfect, starry stillness – a presence, a kind of happiness untouched by who sleeps where or with whom. This is the truth, beloved. This is what I want. How soft. How perfectly full the silence between sighs. I hear them and am afraid to exhale, like the waves of gentle pleasure mounting between mouth and skin. A moon buffered by pines hangs in the balance of now and that which is yet.
In the shop, I consider a muted blue-grey stone hewn from the Upper Peninsula for a necklace and I remember his life-long wish find blue. Like I need another reminder, another symbol lacing together what is here and not here. Walking away, I catch myself wondering how to affix a certain prism to a chord so that I may keep it a little closer. The woman tired of lessons keeps seeing lessons.
A jewelry maker, a librarian and a therapist walk into a bar. That's it – that's the whole joke.
I learned about God and Love from a closeness wrapped in insurmountable distance.
I appreciated a yawning silence dotted by owl cries after capricious winds.
I heard my name whispered in a dream once but the condition upon remembering has to do with forgetting everything else.
The goddess paradox is that the hotter she burns, the closer she is to walking barefoot on December ground, at peace with the light that she is; this and other ways to end a story.