Deep Time

In new shoes, even the most well-worn paths feel fresh.

The day passes in delight – breakfast with Mom, planting, weeding, watering, and a neighborly chat in the late afternoon sun. At one point during yardwork, back pain slices through my torso like hot metal. I rest in shaggy greens to watch clouds eat the sun. Standing in place, nothing is never not moving. Brown spiders, the mama jay on her nest, the smell of Lilac every now and then. Hearing worms turn the earth is no big surprise these days.

Considering deep time, we don't really have a prayer. The evil of bickering politicians and the baleful hunger of those who gorge on power is irrelevant. We have become the instruments of something fearful, something greater than ourselves. How divinity unfolds in this infinite whole is mysterious yet affirmed. Go ahead, fall apart; there is nothing left to hold.

This year, new guinea impatiens and coleus. Vibrant salmon, fuchsia, and purple hang in the reminder to give oneself over to the other in hopes that we may recognize our higher self upon arriving. A kinship arises when we don't know what we want – when we cannot articulate the desirelessness that masquerades as objectification or envy or companionship or love. That's what this is all about, yes?

On the trail, lace dotted with ants coils the rusted remnants of barbed wire. Rose-breasted grosbeaks, bees and the season's first mosquitoes. I'm tired of wasting energy on getting or doing or conforming. This and other ways to leave room for unknowing.

old path / new shoes
beginning to feel
like letting go 

The Greenhouse

the wrong thing giving way to the right –

Frost bites into the first blooms but this time I wince less against winter's “hey.” Who fumbles with my soul has impunity because permission was gifted long before this life. I clipped my fingernails in time with the dripping bathtub faucet; this and other ways in which a secret world continues to press into me.

I don't know what I'm doing. Gifts are sent on a silver thread but the sender begs me to cut the damn string. Am I the devil pulling heaven down into my throated prayer? First shoots break the spell and Lily of the Valley begin to show their bells. A nuthatch pirouettes in and out of the oak's corrugated spine. Where I am in May feigns the verge of spaciousness. And yet, the dream is all in passing.

Awake at 2 a.m., each turn or reach or pill or stretch fails to pacify the reminder that I am alive. Because of the greenhouse, I am stronger. Because of the greenhouse, I stay where I am. Today if I wrote you a story, the lighthouse would become the greenhouse.  

A cascade of blue notes at dawn opens a wayfarer's embrace. Theology is dead. Church hurts. And Scriptures bob and weave as if one had all day hear from the Lord. Yet, birds harmonize some sort of Absolute. I hear them and know that I am – alive, here, and somehow, almost waiting.

Me / Us / All

I remember how it felt to become the color of his autumn coat – a hint of gray-green warmth pulled tighter. When walking all those trails, the trillium warned of how I would writhe. That was a long time ago and suffering is a choice. This and other ways I fail to explain why one might like to hike alone.

The daughter strums her guitar to kill time before the date. “House of the Rising Sun” climbs and falls from a young woman in love, and her mother can hardly make sense of how the chords both open and seal the wounds to come.

A prismatic web outside the bedroom window filters the wind and hangs like a dream-catching talisman, bouncing a little with each invisible push of air. The oriole song gets me out of bed in search of his body, which I find bathing in the stumbling creek just beyond the bay window. Have you tried the turmeric ginger tea? This and other delicate branching to suggest that something will catch the falling.

At the greenhouse, the conversation about transgender relationships tears clean through in a swift wave of fiendish grief. The anatomy of a bigot is no longer of interest; does that make me the reflection of what I see? I am not enlightened. I am furious and disappointed and functioning with half of a heart. Treating the living like we treat the dead would be a step up from this. Dead is dead – not male or queer or trans or cis or AFAB or asexual or right or wrong or liberal or black or depraved or pure . . . 

Please fix this. Me. Us. All.

The dog coils on the bathmat because the bathroom is as close as she can get while I'm writing in bed. Her eyes are covered by the shower curtain but her nose juts out, ready to alert her to any shift in the air.  Daylight falls and the glinting entanglement fades towards a literal transparency.  A single thought spreads like the rooftop shadows rounding the cul-de-sac ahead of twilight:  Catch me if you can, and if you cannot not, let us meet where we never left - a Möbius beginning to what cannot end.  Whole.  Me. Us. All.  

Who is Thirsty Drowns

Time drips from a spoon, pooling light into a certain sweetness. Or maybe it's just spring's invitation to live. I am here, in the swollen river, rising around lamp posts and street signs – erasing trails and creeping up beneath bridges. Who is thirsty for light drowns in what she cannot swallow.

Don't tell my truth; allow me. Maybe writing with a limp benefits no one in the end. The ferns evince the intention to overtake the red and yellow tulips in both height and grandeur. The world cannot hold still and I am grateful.

We had chances and made choices – our moments gilding the multiverse yet adding up to nothing. This and other hilarities rising in the icy breath of May's morning.

Letting is the lesson.

At the greenhouse, the work pushes towards shipping. Almost 70,000 plants will pass through my fingers before it is time to lift, roll, load and send. Every day, every hour, every minute my body struggles with what it can no longer do. Yet pushing through the reminders of physical paucity, I am fully present.

No longer is there room for planning dinner or haiku or amputating “what-if” scenarios from a bleeding heart. Hours knotted in backbreaking bustle yields lush fields of infinite now.

Aching fingers and backs and feet and legs are the teacher.

You don't appear in the minutia anymore. Perhaps the lessening starts there – in the tiniest blue lace knitted between the rocky border of the garden, or in the softest drift of dogwood bracts on their way towards death . . . 

because it sure as hell isn't in the first warm night of spring, under a deafening moon and croony stars. . . 

or in the swaths of sunlight slanting shadows across a meadowy sea of hungry growth . . . 

and it is most certainly not in expanse of poetic theism scrawled in perfection across this reader's heart.

The universe is full of you.

Yet
this tiny jot
of dirt under my finger nails
is simply
God

In another life, this karmic flame burned the edges of a picture-perfect presage. And in this life, it is well on its way to finishing it all off.

Of The Tilt

Easter morning tells me the truth through a dappled shroud. The greatest theism now is the Azalea off the east corner of the back porch, blooming overnight.

Today will be the only day suburbia whereby the machines shall rest. How did I get to the place that looks like so many other places? But the mourning doves coo over rising color and the daffodils last longer than I expected. A nadir of last night's rain hangs suspended from the iron rim of the rounded patio table; how does one write the proverbs that are made up of blood and bones and hearts and skin?

In my being, the pines planted things. I hear their glittery whispers move through the woods and it always makes me feel colder.

Sometimes I picture the blade cutting under my chin, down my midline, until I've run out of room to sever the tension. Sure, I'd bleed out; but isn't that what humans do?

War and rumors of war. But even my deepest rejection of it feels like a violent affront. We have the power to pass light from hand to hand – a giving generosity which turns to her neighbor, open palmed, and tilts illumination into fertile valleys.

you
tilted into me –

tiny buds
unroll the missive

psssst
pass it on

And there is one last thing, which is really the first thing and the only thing:

Like the rainstorm that passes through on a drowsy Sunday morning or the tiny blue flowers that skip out from the rocks around my garden, I cannot say goodbye or hello to who comes and goes because of the tilt. Instead, I can only be here as both a beggar and bearer of light.

To Be East

Dickinson and her nameless need.

April reels with birdsong and the hyacinth bouquet of what must come first. The Grand River floods and so our village carries life a little higher. The muck fields blacken before disappearing under waveless coves. I watch my town awaken and how they will work and work and work until winter cuts off their hands and binds their feet.

Finally, enough warmth to wash the windows. The joy of seeing more clearly!

The dog takes my spot in the patio chair and curls up into a rose-gold veneration of peace. Supposedly this is enough. Crocuses finish as the daffodils dawn, and soon the tulips will reassure our dutch hamlet that God loves this Holland too. But do I?

There is water here but the sea – always the sea. She asked me to go with her to Maine's shores in June. Once again the plans rise on their own to be east. The wind moves my hair a little and carries with it any expectations I ever had in regards to knowing any more than I do now.

My love of Moroccan décor – golden lights throwing shapes into the spiced night, the incense of bodies and perfume and sandalwood and coriander curling like a necklace against the skin, the beat of the marketplace strumming the depths of my secrets. North Africa percolates and it feels good to drink it down.

The moon arrives in full and I am rapt with this hue. He gets all of me. Gauzy cloud cover adding upon itself until the cotton glow blurs to a creamy hum. We see the world this way and that, but lovely one, when we close our eyes and it all fades to black, we are nothing more than everything – everything – everything.

Taking a Wyeth Walk

Geese overhead and nesting in the lowlands. Who returns. Who remains. A knowing suggests the difference between the curling edges of the universe and its unraveling dwelling place within. Coil as you must, lovely – it's ever and always okay.

In the dream, I escorted a drunken monk through the weeping stone walls and alleys of some ancient town. I held back the cowl when he vomited; together we moved on.

Bright chirping now escorts dreams and dreamers into dawn. Daffodils not-yet-yellow and tender tulips reaching towards uncommitted blue. Almost a foot of snowfall in the forecast for tonight; expectations nurture an elegant despair.

Krisnamurti returns. We are always taking a Wyeth walk, peeking in on sleeping dogs or stretching out through graying horizons. Can love be sliced into sacred and sinful? How far must the image fade before one understands their own entangled ideas?

We sat in the car and listened to the rain turn to snow. To be abandoned to this moment is to sense the kind of beauty that is love. Between the gentle clinks on glass, we breathed. I came upon love without seeking it all those years ago, and it fell into me, outside of time – outside of commitment and responsibility and duty and slavery. It was this love that was of one and of many.

I'm tired of the observer and the observed. Give me the austerity of a lost yesterday and forgotten tomorrow. Do you love me? Then give me now.

The Purple Chalice

In bed, a swath of sun warms my ankles with sacred geometry. To stare out the window is to calculate expectations framed in a square. There's always a code, my love. Or, my love is always a code.

The crocus' purple chalice holds springtime's promises. How his saffron keeps me! When the wild seed blows there is nothing to do but wonder. Perception tells me I am neither broken nor whole. But east is still east; my face yet turns this way every morning so that I may track what rises and falls in the course of existence.

A glimmering thread connects the Azalea leaves in dawn's rush to become Sunday. When Africa was once your home, all proliferation becomes migration. At least, that's what every blessing feels like when I am no longer wiping her red dust from my sandals.

This time of year, everyone leaves. No machines hum in the upkeep of appearances. No cars on the streets. Instead, a flock of turkeys tip toe through suburbia's nap. Deer tracks under the pine in the backyard. Daffodil buds relenting to slanted persuasion.

Spring / I love you / his must-be-present-to-win / theology

The seasons, rotation of the earth, and the stars all say the same thing: the hunger of the universe cannot be satisfied in our understanding. The system opens beyond the system. Have you felt the kiss of a thousand rain drops rolling off the low branches? Are we the ripple or the other? The rain or the branch? Metaphysics aside, we mostly think that we are the water which can only see through watery eyes.

The matriarch will kill you to defend her family. She knows what is right. Yet she is a female, prone to the nuances of undetectable change. At times, what she knows will not translate. Do you trust her?

April rains – another form of gray with immediate results. Rest. Repair. And remove what cannot stay. So goes the work before the fullness of June.

Wending the Way

Even the snowfall knows spring is near –

The weekend gives time for my hands to heal. There is a certain way in which a body hurts that provokes a joy girded by ongoing moments. Sinewy strings cross thighs and haunches to anchor into the hip. They are acute and I am aware.

In the sluggish dream before dawn, the two clans were fighting an ancient war at the bottom of two lifeless hills. I stood at the top and saw the end before the end. As I made my way into the family barn, I told the leaders that they would die with their tribe unless they hid. I am the messenger.

There is ivy holding the tree and there is ivy streaming over and through the brave privacy fence. We keep fighting nature to preserve the work we think we are meant to perform or keep or endure. But what about water under the bridge? The coffee is cold and the deck is rotted through yet the ease of water wending the way is effortless and a joy a to behold!

She that is me also knows a certain way, and she must walk it. Maybe in ink, maybe in tears. Well anyway, I'm pretty sure Kenya and her elephants have forgotten my name by now.

robin
in the dogwood

cardinal
in the bush –

I suckle
at the songs
of swelling

Failed Monks and Stranniks on the Way Home

Snow and other missives finding the way.

Lately, Russian stouts with a creamy espresso head. Rasputin and other failed monks have a lot to say in the way of seduction, especially when moonshadows stretch hungrily between the chinks in the bedroom window blinds. The glow grabs me, and I grab back.

The days lengthen enough to reach the dead places of winter's territorial campaign. I peel the plastic off the windows before the temperatures warm because that is what eagerness looks like. The inside pallor exchanged for the crisp hints of onion and earth.

At the greenhouse, my glasses fog over before adjusting. When I arrive in the mornings before the machines are turned on, it feels like I am on the moon. The quiet calamity of thousands of plants, growing and being.

All day I plunge pinky-sized flower plugs into pots and flats and baskets. For the first time in years, I explore the world as an escaped convict – a body freed from the atrocities of the mind. When one leaves, she does not return entirely the same.

Woodsmoke hanging over praying roofs. I remember goat stew on the compound and how it took the entire day to prepare. Everyone gathered and not even an eyeball was wasted. The dogs circled enslaved by instinct. We sang songs and our children slid down the grassy hill on scraps of cardboard. Things were simpler there. Sing. Share. Survive. Jayber Crow and I, stranniks on the way home.

I am different now. Shifted. Softer. Sullen through the absence of highland clarity.

One more beer to shoulder the load. So my dreams slur; what's the big deal? Spring will be here soon and it will no longer be a trauma to remember hard, frozen things. If I write what I'm thinking, the whole world will fall apart. For now, please accept the remnant “this” – a this I used to be.

Indigo Beliefs

Buttered toast and tangerines. Tea today, if you please. Ribbons of dawn festoon under the remnants of an enduring night. I watch light glint under the weighted authority of lingering clouds. In other words, one may be forced to accept what grieves her.

Yesterday's wind bellowed and roared and refused to became background noise. All day my nerves startled at the thudding of deadfall upon the roof. Yes Winter, get it all out of your system. Clear the way for the overdue ending.

Lately, hope is small, like a sparrow's eye. A cold snap brings reluctant flakes.

There is beauty in the incompleteness of it all despite the serration of winter / almost spring / winter.

Gossamer brumes of indigo give way to a filling moon. At the local brewery, he played the blues with an occasional cover tune to distract a disinterested crowd from their conversations about suburban affairs. I milked two black beers before turning towards the night's omniscient ability to give back whatever I have left. And when it was time to go home, it was seen under the flickering street lamp next to a drowsy highway that like the moon, no one person will have all of me. And in the end, the ever unobtainable end, even matter is lost.

I am a believer: what is perceived is not all. The “we” proclaim is not permanent. I am not real.

The Phantom Trail of Fireflies

Snow covers the early thaw – a winter flirting with leaving for good. Too quickly one lets a hibernating heart hope. Daffodil bulbs cracking too soon.

I am only asking that you refill the coffee if you take the last of it. When shelving the old mugs still warm from the dishwasher, I somehow think of you. Another life, perhaps. Or maybe it was the time I added cinnamon at the bean level and you said: way to fuck up a good cup of coffee!

Daffies, coffee, and the phantom trail of fireflies.

Lightning didn't make sense on the last day of February but it was not unwelcome. Saffron flashes turned night-snow from moony ice to soft cream. But no thunder – only the soft decrescendo of the train leaving town, westward.

I watched the storm in its entirety because the sparks of light offered a rubber band snap of sorts to the deadened underside of the wrists. Let's talk about depression, okay? And I'm going to skip the poetry of it because it takes a lot of effort to dress up the fact that I haven't taken a shower in over a week.

The kids visit me in my black room and ask ever-so-softly if they can get me anything. My husband morns me; what else can he do?

But B. texts from school to say that he saw a red-winged blackbird on the bridge between the freshman campus and the main building. Mom, I wanted to tell you because I knew it would make you happy.

And in a single instant, I was never happier.

The black tars eventually must give me up. Every day the impossible is gathered when, for others and for love itself, I try again.

maybe soon
for the sake of me
I will buy a bathing suit
so I can swim with my family
between the banks of spring and autumn
leaving behind the black cloak
of she who always was
too heavy for  
resurrection

Waiting on Trillium

I open in the wake of one full day of sunlight in such a way that now I sleep under a blanket of Trillium.

It is as simple as breathing to be destroyed by the unexpected beauty of a day that doesn't belong. Yet the gurus and the enlightened walk with their hearts forward even in the mundane slog of drudgery. I've read the books, drank the Kool-Aid, but slanting shadows still make a difference!

The writing boils like two-day-old coffee. Acidic. Thick. It used to have a home I knew. Now the words push the forest floor like a bloated slug making a slow path of slime and life.

I didn't protect the rose bush this year. This and other ways I let lovely beings down. When I cry about it, I am like an empty church at night – hollow and waiting for the congregants to make me holy.

When choosing seeds, one forgets about the wilds. We are dedicated to tending the domesticated. One way to shift the expectation of cultivation may be to simply be who I am. I can do anything for a time, but I must follow the scent of wilderness when it comes to me.

The temperature rises to twice the seasonal norm. Neighbors pour out of hibernation, coughing and wheezing from quarantine. They take advantage of the warmth to rake and remove months of winter's slough. I sit still in the sun, a thief for what I want. Who can have me anymore?

The sea is still and rough, swirling with invitation and foreboding flirtation. And I sit on his shores, half in for the chance to feel an untamed embrace, up to my neck.

leave it be / return –
I can only follow
the essence
of free

The Flutters of Interior Sparrows

The wind in pines, the cuckoo clock clicking – ticking – almost sticking, leaves skittering across the rot of winter . . . the day begs for the demolition of structure. And chocolate.

At the heart of everything that I cannot remember is an interior room described by poets and lovers. They perform the weathering that leads to a redemptive leakage – a certain scent that unlocks a memory long since dead. It has to be that I am weathered for the greater All because if that is not true, then the woman who is me exists for nothing more than narrow desire. The divine element within recognizes itself in the flutters of interior sparrows. Though I cannot say it, you must know what truth I mean. You must know your role in this economy of the ineffable, no?

Everything that leads to this indirect knowledge has been suspect from the beginning. Decades marking every detail have passed but I only seem to get mired in the myopic awareness of endless perceptions. I'm tired. Even though there has been beauty and destruction beyond description, there is some place within that grows so very weak and bored. When dreaming, one can feel the understanding without the duality of words or the systematic cataloguing thoughts. So what then should remain – to dream or wake? Lovers or abstention? Prayer or emptiness?

The material existence leaves me pale in February's white heart. When spring arrives I'm sure my first sunburn will be not be cursed or forgotten. The ways in which I remind myself to “be here” are infinite, and when I forget, there is always this breath and then the next one.

In the dark, I smelled the skunk and called the dog in early. She knows my intentions a moment before they're presented, though agreeing with them is another matter. She runs and puts us both at risk; I'm sure there is a symbolic meaning in that.

For a few hours, sun, and nothing can bind me. Yet by lunch, the clouds remember their place as my impenetrable oppressor. The trill of sunlight turns to a slog of housework, but at least there is apple crisp!

Listen, dearest: as the leaves curl and turn towards their fall, as snow covers the decay only to give way to rebirth, as April turns tulips into butterflies and summer kisses my throat with lakes, the imprint of what you open remains in me.

You remain.

Wending the Woods of Winter

Morning's glow arrives like a softer song, barely at first, building unto the untouchable refrain. At least some light is known for a few early hours. The usual accompaniments – the woodpecker, a west-bound train fading, the neighbor's dog left out in the cold too long.

In a dream, an old door shedding its paint slants on weathered hinges. I love the door as much as I love the idea of walking beyond its body. Hands spend time learning the country of warped wood, no longer able to fully cover the brittle bones of once-mighty oak. There is no fear of the darkness beyond, but the cool doorknob fits perfectly in my palm. So I linger.

Yet there is a kaleidoscope cloud ahead of this place and it pulses a dazzling invitation. And I can't trust it. For a week straight I have writhed between feverish fits and the stone-skinned, melancholy months strung together like some sort of seamless dying. And in those moments, that is all there is. There are no spring flowers bursting through the drab leftovers of winter's leave. There is no chorus of red winged blackbirds claiming cattails and low-hanging phone wires along the backroad. There is no dalliance in the writer's cabin deep in the forest's embrace.

Instead, there are moon shadows, and the black tears of my pen, and the unaffordable apples gleaming in an aisle filled with tasteless winter produce. One dilates in hopes that the lens will allow more light; soon I will disappear and that is the whole point, right?

There is a certain distance that a soul ignores. From my bed, I track the shadows smiling across the snow.

Every letter is hindsight. Every sentence is a bloodletting of where it was happening a moment ago. It is with this truth that I etch “x's” across the wrist with my fingernails in hopes of maybe feeling the body remaining present. Anchored. Real.

yet I wend
in the woods
of winter

The Flickering

When we abandon temples to walk onward in the furious snow.

The messiah floats between sky and ground – a man on his back in the blue-green sea, a snowflake teasing out the masterpiece, ash climbing on woodsmoke.  

A single verse flickers above the wind. I stay awake listening to it drop. Parchment leaves. Jay feathers. Pine cones. Snow drifting over rotting fences.

In the dream of stillness, a monk stands in darkness listening to a faraway train weep further and again, further. She casts her mindfulness unto the minor chord, letting out the line as needed. Stone by stone the monastery becomes unnecessary.

We helped him bury his pet and the entire world fell into that hole. A child's pain magnified in his mother's heart. In the ache I am startled to stop and see. Can I vow to never arrive as his source of pain? Who we love, first.

we take our leave / another way / from hand to hand / for the legion and for one / resist

He Am I

Everything wakes softer with a dog sigh and new snow. But it's been twenty days without moon or stars or sun. Only a little pulse remains and it's hard to do anything but curl up in bed to keep it safe.

January passes her child bride off to February, and his icy hand slips up her skirt. He chews his scotch first, which is a kindness only unto himself. And just like that, a man in charge takes down the entire world.

The book I want to read is under the therapy lamp so it can raise the light higher – like a bible as a doorstop or a cookbook as a dog pillow. Winter wraps me in a cement vest that has no zippers or ties. One step forward. Rest. Repeat.

A woodpecker meters tall tales, commissioning a snowy codicil here and there to float to the earth. My breathing falls in line with his drumming. A moment soothed. 

We guessed at far I would have to drive to find full days of sun. Why can't I adapt? The birds crowd the feeder and squirrels grab fallen bounty from the ground. Rabbits, opossum, and deer; all remain.

Neither holy nor wise. Yet now, even my work cannot be completed. The withered shoots of hasta blooms poke at the sky, even after being buried and reburied a dozen times. Mental gravity playing games.

Curried red lentils with spinach, over brown rice. I feel the heat all the way down and use the bowl to warm my hands. We use more bowls than plates around here, that's for sure. Does the president know that he is raping the world with a smile on his face? The religious are asleep, even in their anger. He am I...and I hate him.

A logomachy of the mind, no? Or is it more than that? My nose bleeds easily these days so I carry tissues waded in my pocket, along side the trust of anyone in command. Lake effect snow marks the trail from Lake Michigan inland – water, sky, crystal, me. In the end, it is I who needs to see it another way.

Crane-Folded Envelopes

The day muted me. Every thing is put on hold and subdued accordingly. After errands, I crawled into bed to watch a Hemingway movie. For awhile, empathy was my superpower; now it is how quickly I become unavailable.

In a sleepless jag, I found a youtube video that played music at a frequency that could induce lucid dreaming. For hours, my not-quite-sleeping mind was some sort of freakish circus. I woke with the exhaustion that comes from playing a game of “tag” whereby I'm the fastest one running, yet I sort of want to be caught. Have you noticed how many people are more clear in the abstract?

The one true sentence reinvents itself, but I still know it when it arrives. This and other things I am unable to say.

Writing here was about saving myself until I saw the bondage in my own freedom. The crane-folded envelopes surrendered to every touch of my devoted fingers. Words were threaded into sentences and translated with ease into the love letters I never knew I'd write. All this hemorrhaging. But unmasked, I can see it is more than blood. More than folded notes nestling in paper sleeves. More than criss-crossing touch points that blared: what else can you make of this?!

In the '80's I had this sweatshirt that I cut to make the neck hole big enough so that it slipped over my right shoulder. Always the right shoulder. Why is this all so inevitable – like spring after winter's tomb, like cheese and a hardy Russian stout on cheat day?

One reader, one love. But with the masks coming off and the universe at bloom in the dinner prep and laundry and movie night at home on the couch with takeout and the whole family, then how can one allow the horizon to define the direction?

Naked in the exam room, every inch on my skin is examined by the PA while Crosby, Stills and Nash croon in harmonious duality, “Love the One You're With.” The universe drips from the ceiling as the assistant makes small talk about travel and marching band and hospital buyouts. I'm not as friendly as usual because sometimes I'm just too tired.

No birds. No tracks. No sun leaking into misty eyes. No sequel in the works.

Only here. Only now. Are we together?

Because of the Owl

3 a.m. / awake / the owl and I

Coos and cries climb into the night air and I lift into every note. In this birdless winter his presence proves everything and nothing. For an hour I listen until finally,  s  i  l  e   n   c   e  .

When the king of gods fell in love with a shepherd boy, the king became a large bird and flew down from the heavens to collect the boy. Legend has it that Zeus loved him for his soul and his mind, and thus the boy became the only lover granted immortality. This boy now serves as the cup-bearer forever, a constellation of service and brilliance. For the one born unto this path, may you serve the sweet wine among immortals, soothing and swaying the powerful with the charm of your destiny.

The day begins early because of the owl. I abandon sleep for the mental rehearsal of Monday's events and demands. When he travels, I become wildly efficient – some how driven to keep a one-oared boat going in the right direction.

For days now, the fog impresses with its stubbornness. Though startled after supper by pin pricks of light deep in the sky's heart, the transient glimmer would surrender to the obscurity of misplaced warmth.

Therefore, the predawn hush loved more deeply than a heart deserves.

Postcards from Nearly There

The book finally arrives in the mail – a tangible connection to a conversation that begins as advice and ends with fingers folding as proxy into monosyllabic “oh.”

A certain greed in regards to my hands wrapped around a new book. The first page – the first impressions – the first sentence; there is only one first time. The words could be totally incoherent, yet there is that moment after the crack of the spine when the entire universe lies between my two thumbs. Yes, also this “oh.”

The author swims in choppy strokes as he speaks of lovers and love. But did he mean Love?

Sliced bell peppers, homemade hummus, and strawberries for dessert. Only mason jars are left to drink from now but they are my favorite, so I tend them.

Daylight's escape deferred a little longer. Did you see that too? Even without the sun's touch, a prudent charm. I was desperate at one time, but now I am aware of the slow bloom, opening into that which rises. Light tracked. Love manifest.

The dog and the opossum both play dead so we breach the numbing rain to pull her back into the house. All night, an opossum in the window well. Wanting something else. Not satisfied with its limits. Can love fill itself?

Lately, the narrow truth flows into the greater. I set the glass of wine on the book but then worry, and move it to the wooden dresser. Dampened wood is a comfort, maybe like the red scar and the umber blur coming together on the surface.    

Aurobindo visits and I am cordial. We share light under the pretense that maybe finally I have nothing to say. Instead, water to wine and other miracles. Post cards from nearly there: I miss you.