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October arriving.

The gray squirrel bawls a raspy convulsion in a 3 second loop.

Dead oak leaves fall upon dead maple leaves in piles shaped like prehistoric continents – almost connecting an entire dead world.

In a dream last night, sink holes kept opening up on the road and I could do nothing to help others until I made myself safe.

The fireplaces are not in use yet, but burning leaves hang an ancestry in the air at night like a garland of bon voyage. October welcoming goodbye.

So Persephone naps.

For lunch, a chilled lentil salad with balsamic vinegar and lemon water.

I procrastinate a shower because even the thought of being cold and naked evokes shockwaves up my spine and down my limbs.

He takes one first so I jump in after.

Warmer.

October arriving.

The circumference of sunlight throughout the forest broadens.

And my freckles are still visible, especially against white shower walls.

Maybe I've always been an object, best used by hungry men. That's not true, of course. But maybe. 

Wildflowers and Free Falling and Las Vegas and Puerto Rico and you don't know how it feels – now you are October.

Light as a refugee; the painted forest falls.

Another glass of wine or whiskey, if you please. Kiss me, I'm Irish, so keep the “e.”

Camel and caramel and carmine colored proof of letting go. The leaves will only take it so far.

But you wreck me baby. So I breath it all in deep and save exhalation for later. Gator.

October arriving.

Out of Line

The torment and art of letters unwritten arrives at dawn in a certain angle of light that reminds one of what she knows, which, of course, is absolutely nothing. Rainbow cables connecting pine branches. Evergreen bushes topped with crispy golden oak leaves like a peach cobbler or Mom's sour cream coffee cake. No matter how tightly the scroll is rolled and sealed and bound in cement to be thrown in the deepest part of the darkest sea, the words migrate or lift or arrive like a searing flame every – single – day. There is no other way to say this: I've been branded.

This heart is out of line – a destroyer constructed to open the veins, to add red to the cool tones of a perfect painting. One step closer, two steps back. That is how the ravenous protects the ones they love; it is how they pray.

Roiling under the exterior. Let there be peace on earth and let it begin with me. The mantra collides with lava; hence, brimstone. Hence the writing that only arrived when two flames licked the air they shared, almost touching. Almost combusting.

Yesterday I found the black moleskine in which he took dictation for me while I drove. After every poetic thought or observation written, he added his own “ * kisses. * ” Because he loves me in some sort of fireproof way.

The temperature drops enough for the heat to kick on. Forced air smells collected and artificial and it reminds me at the sensory level that I can't have it both ways.

Beckett mentioned MIT which is only 4 more hours of driving time from here than Michigan Tech, and did you know that Michigan is always under Massachusetts in the scroll-down menus when you have to pick your state online?

Lake Michigan is not the sea but it looks like the sea and behaves like the sea. And it's warmer in the summer and freezes around the edges sometimes in the winter. The variance wobbles with the weight of differences that converge. The question now is, what is the temperature at the edges at the merge?

I'd like to know more about that.

Unhinging

Reading MRI orders and notes on Chiari malformations and the face of her neurologist through finger-smudged glasses. What mattered yesterday takes a backseat to this moment. And the next. Dad sits in on the appointment; he's worried or he doesn't want to miss something or he hates that he is no longer practicing medicine. And he loves us. The medical system is a leviathan writhing up from the depths to assist or destroy, depending on how one plays the game of survival.

A storm lingers after a 4 a.m. The darker dawn opens its throaty yawn just enough to reveal leaves unhinging with the rain. I stretch out a choppy sleep under the overhang on the deck forgetting about the silver dollar spider and her masterwork up in the left corner. Shit shit shit! I bring down the work, and her ghost crawls all over my neck and shoulders for the rest of the morning.

Lately, dark matter and everything else that exists that cannot be perceived. Maybe there is something to that place where math and the un-mappable intersect. A constant overturning of truth, the great abstract, the undiluted unseen – we are here because of the invisible. So, not dark matter, transparent matter.

How the light bends changes things – an untrustworthy account of a surpassing Other.

through / beyond / right here

The foliage is more yellow than red, which does not make one color better than another but it does satisfy a heart's vacuum for variance. That's the best way I can explain what is going on here.

Leaf management strategy. Clear a little as you go or wait for the final drop? The others who toil along the way will not appreciate the wind's helping hand in carrying the uncollected masses into their clarity. But the leaf pick-up crew charges per visit. The leaves will heap taller than the old Subaru, the entire length of the driveway, and backs will ache from now until the first snowfall. A suburban forest and its drawbacks.

A few blooms yet. Though, October's vampire falls in love with his hunger while we sleep, slowly sipping a little off the top each night. I still want things in the distance. I still need to see.

Nothing in the Perfect Amount

Savoring each inch, crawling over September, straddling one's way up into Libra's seat. I know what must die to get there, yet a delight engages in the slow burn.

Waiting on clouds from the West. The parched earth adds resonance to leaves scraping out a landing. This drought seems to quiet the jays who usually have something to say. Yet the heron says nothing in the perfect amount. A dropped feather floats and to watch it drift away is the fitting end to that which can never.

In the patchwork clearing of night's humidity, a few peek-a-boo constellations take requests. I ask for a song wrapped in a blood-orange maple leaf, folded in tomorrow's envelope. October is around the bend and it will place the lyrics gently swaddled in the manger of what remains. Outside of thought. Outside of wisdom. Outside of winter's calipers measuring a girl's worth.

Don't untie the knots just yet; the flow is not as impotent as one might think.

The sedum blushes a little deeper and the canopy begins to yawn. October is for strolling, for woodsmoke, for thicker blankets and socks. When the wind blows, a murmuration of leaves shoves the breath and mind off into a brief and brilliant holiday elsewhere. He says I pronounce “else” with an “n” between the “l” and the “s.” And . . . he turns 16 today and I can't imagine my life without him.

While the acorns stole the show with percussive downbeats, pines steadily dropped their needles unnoticed. As if overnight, a copper flag unfurled over hostas and archangel and stone-stepped pathways. This is a certain paradise I cannot refuse.

there are others
in the arms of autumn
along the way

On The Table

Glinting strands wave and disappear in the barely breeze. Early morning is the only time bearable to be out in late September's bizarre heatwave. I walk with the heathens Sunday morning. Each street lends a theme along the way – frying sausage, cinnamon rolls, laundry in the dryer. At the park, September's potpourri fills each of the senses. Sunlight heats the last of the blooms to an earthy musk mingled with leaves already surrendered. Downy goose feathers rest in cradles of yellowing grass and resplendent beads are held over in the soaring humidity. How unexpected and happy Michigan can be!

Lately, stacks of cookbooks. One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. Woolf and other meaningful coalescing.

A red-sickle moon negating all queries. The tip-toeing girl, the night skulker, the one who gets so far away . . . she will drift if she has the chance. She will wield that scythe in harvest and in justification and when leveling the overgrowth of perception. What is incomplete lingers and then laughs at being thought of as “incomplete.” Can you imagine that kiss?

The room of windows acts like a greenhouse on these sweltering days. Dime-sized lakes pool on the houseplant leaves; I dip my my middle finger in, turn my wrist up, and taste. It's not mine to consume, but tasting is okay, yes? There is enough.

No more firefly messengers. No more phantasm chances to skinny dip in black waters. Kora nuzzles one of the last fuschia blooms and a pollen-drunk bee lumbars from the magenta cup. She snaps at it, startling at my objection. There are whole trees without leaves now, just in the last day or so. Still autumn waters show everything.

The neurologist ordered another MRI and assembled a neurosurgical team to discuss the issue. How quickly a daughter's life flickers in her mother's heart when brain surgery is on the table! “On the table” becomes a leaky, watercolor phrase, bleeding here and there until there is no stain left on the invoice. She told the doctor that her band schedule is paramount and he pointed his pen at her and said: no it isn't.

Winter showers soon enough, but today I sweat a great heat through my pores and wonder about what else I need to taste before it is no longer on the table.

The Paper Trail

A spider waits in the upper left corner of the doorframe, clinging to an unseasonably warm background. Opening the door draws the web inward and the spider shifts ever so slightly. For three days I am startled by her acorn abdomen at eye level. And on the fourth day, I tell her that Bob Dylan is coming to town and that I am making green beans and roasted chicken for dinner and that Beckett turns sixteen next week.

The wind is  now able to twirl dry leaves without effort and walking down the lane is noisy – I am noisy. The ecology of the collective has not been juked, perhaps some wallflower planting though. Seeping works that way.

Humidity fogs up my glasses as I wend a way through goldenrod and wild blackberry vines and tiny blue chalices I've never known the name of. I remember the day Father Don told the parish he was leaving. It was the late 80's and his hair was spiked and he wore jelly rubber bands around his wrist even during Mass. The youth was in love with this "DJ Priest" and we wept our goodbyes at communion that day. This, too, was my last day in the Catholic Church. Years later it was rumored that he left the priesthood under the mental duress of not being able to reconcile his vow of celibacy with the love he saw in the world. I was too young then to understand the portal of skin and eyes and soft passionate voices whispering holiness, and I am yet too young to grasp it still. But I know the thinning veil when I brush up against it.

One thing I have in common with my father is the love of yellow foolscap against the oaken table. His pad contained lists and notes about patients or football stats or various jobs he wanted to complete on his day off. Mine held the first feeble steps of poetry, barely gracing the page, like fawn steps or first kisses or curling cinnamon sassafras leaves finally landing in the holly bush. Angst and beauty came to life on those papers and surprised me. The proof of my pain and hatred for the way I was treated had a paper trail – yellow with blue lines and sometimes red ink and more often than not, puckered dried-up ponds where the tears hit.

The spider was gone today when I opened the door to let the dog out before dawn. No trace remained of her craft or her thoughts on the heat or any indication of impatience. 

the spider, the priest, the foolscap paper –
all framing the wind
in the wild

According to September's Want

Resplendence on the way to October. Butterflies foraging with honey bees this late in the game. Markedly more than last year, acorns pelt the roof and rattle over the sides – sometimes in giant, angry handfuls.

On the elimination diet, I am thinking more and more about chocolate. And Kenyan AA coffee. And Manchego cheese. But red wine sort of fills the crevices so thirsty for decadence. As this season gives way to the next, blushes of color escalate unto a blazing end. Before the long shrouded sleep, bare branches will rake at a gruesome sky. And I will sip cardinal intoxication for the health of it – for the gun shot pain of it.

For now, light bends according to September's want. Spicy chili, pumpkin muffins, and turmeric tea. The holograph of happiness is one that I willingly allow these days. Everyone is putting out chrysanthemum welcome mats, and I am ordering lamps for all the plants I'm going to save this year. Maybe the greenhouse work will penetrate bones and keep a verdant percolator bubbling until spring.

Did you see the cloud-scuffed moon last week? Did you try to drink moonlight full into your eyes and gaping mouth? The stars were stacked like Grandpa's cigarette pack that he kept rolled up on his arm at all time. The white pine was so still – frozen in the absence of tree frogs and night-calling katydids.

Fingerprints in a used book. What do words mean outside of the moment? Letters imprinting like rabbit tracks in a first snowfall . . . remnants of a slight heat, recording a moment's direction before it is erased, flake by drifting flake. Yet the tingle of seeing those tiny prints, glittering in a later dawn, pointing the way, away.

At the head of temporary bridges it is easy to see how their planking sentences are bolted with intent. That which carries, over rivers and ravines. Over beauty and certain death. Over the distance of blessing and curse. The question is no longer: should or shouldn't I cross. Instead, only: why is it here?

The Altering Outer

Green acorns litter every step from deck to gardens. Manna is a matter of perspective: one's bruised bare foot is another's windfall.

The blinds are broken on the bedroom's west-facing window. Now they are always down – closed to sunlight bent through pines / to orange-red-pink / to the familiar benevolence that anchors unspooling days. In the room of windows I push my knees against the creamy corduroy loveseat to turn it more westerly for a time. This thinner light takes it all apart. Certain salutations hover over an image awaiting the recognition of touch; how easily the story drifts without it.

Colder nights bring animals in to the bedroom walls. Acorns, rodent parties, and eleventh-hour fireworks sew the seams of midnight into a sleepless wholeness. One considers the altering outer and is arrested by the lack of stasis. So she drifts, Beloved, picking up what rains down, not to collect or store – but to live.

Standing at the edge of his bed I untie my black satin robe more shyly than our years together might suggest. It's playful at first, but the kiss finds a way to betray...containment, image, proclivity. What was closed, opens; distance crawls away ashamed. This ingress allows one to pass tracelessly onward. Have we not met there before?

Potato leek soup with fresh fruit on the side. More doctors tomorrow. More change. How increasingly strange to notice the aching knee or dimming eyes when the Watcher is climbing the mountain!

Every night for hours I listen to her scales and etudes and solos. I know her phrasing and how it is informed by auditions and professors and goals. She is better than I was and she wants it more. Her art grows resonant and amplified.

Quickened and stilled / I am caught in it.

And so finally, the weekend fulfills a last promise, and night reclaims its infinite reservoir. Which dreams will transcend? What hair-line crack of truth?

I gather myself / into folds / of raven robes / in hand-tied play / undone

Swimming the Length of the Next Fall

Wind chime dissonance floats into the bedroom. They grind on my sensibilities like when Dad would play Springsteen or Seeger as loudly as the system could handle. It was music I didn't ask for, which always felt arrogant. The neighbor's chimes continue to force themselves upon that invisible place, triggering what cannot be reset.

now / everyday / chimes.

Pad Thai and lemon cookies with powdered sugar nestled in perfectly baked valleys. September always begins the negotiation of that moment when nothing in the world will keep the alertness of my skin from happening. Barn jackets and scarves and earth-jeweled palettes. A copulant beauty glitters in the crisper air. I suppose that is why I have always threatened to head east in autumn; this is the time when every cell pulsates under the skin, ripening unto my fullest harvest.

her basket nestled on the hip / gather / carry / consume

At 3 a.m. acorns fall cracking dreams wide open. Shotgun entry wounds form a portal of momentary confusion. In the lengthening dark, cognizance swims the length of the next oceanic fall. How autumn is heard.

When we come from so far to get nowhere at all – September. The room of windows is cold already – so more blankets. More coffee. More tea. Lou said they sent the scat to the DNR and with a giddy glint asked me to guess from which animal it came. Bear? This far south? No! Yes! And so the animation billowed and chortled to my absolute delight. Not everyone is pleased about it, though.

The lake at night – never neutral and sometimes terrifying, and yet, always an abiding tingle of freedom and clandestine undoing. The blackened water reaches in to remove my name from its haughty throne. She takes a knee every time. Other fantasies are amusements of the distracted heart, but our clothing dropping to the dock in exchange for the weightless cloak of night is so much more than that. It is the marriage of the sacred and profane. And it is the music of our rippled wake tickling the dock as we move from two cautious bodies wading in the shallows to one shivering exchange in the unknowing depths.

Which dishonest performance is preferred the most? One doesn't need to be good to be great. This and other highways I'll ride to get to the truth. Already beyond. Already too far.

Calling Up the Blood

Earlier this year than last, sleep becomes serrated unto 3 a.m. It is too cold to leave the cocoon of summer blankets. I listen to podcasts and storytelling and news from unreachable lands but in the end, it is singing bowls that tuck me in tighter. In the last dream, the Dalai Lama visits with a holy comfort. We make some jokes together but mostly he is a quiet companion hedging the cliff of unimaginable grief.

The unspooling of summer, with her tenor-tap acorns and chameleon adornments, always presents the same lesson: let go. I don't want this lecture anymore. Yet I arrive at the edge of a pine forest in complete heartache over his silence. The pines are different than other woods – they whisper if they say anything at all, and it is this quiescence that calls up the blood from my being. I'm like that . . . I'll stand there at the verge, overtaken by beauty, unable to accept the responsibility of sullying or ruining what is perfect. So too, my study of Dickinson or the mountains and glacial blues of New Zealand or the hike on Riley Trail that brings one out atop a massive dune overlooking Lake Michigan. This certain hunger lingers. Eventually I step in; that is what it means to be an October child of deep lakes, reflecting the fire of untouchable canopies.

Hours slip away on the rotting back deck. The warmth won't last. The sun won't stay. Therein lies the difficulty of being present only. A flash of red rustles yellowing hasta leaves and his familiar chirrup foreshadows the savior sound of red. Before surrendering to Wednesday, the carmine curl of a maple leaf at my feet.

So it is – red begins.

Anchorless Distance

Soon, the steep rise of leafless branches. One ponders picking flowers from a thicket yet refrains. How often do words reach behind; how often does intuition swim ahead? The lake-shaped horizon placates the query. Long looks far away – an anchorless distance.

Filling the watering can reveals a perfect half moon of dazzling jewels just beneath the opening. An unseen web finally exalted and the pedestrian life of care-taking reaps a small reward. Every bend of the back, every wooden floorboard scrubbed, every ingredient harvested, assembled and cooked . . . a life stitches itself together in the small moments of nothing. But do they stitch me?

Mosquitos are still active this late in the game but have now begun to wane. Bees, chrysanthemums and acorn tops. Michigan's hand still waves but the arthritic bones warn of the granite ahead. We who grip the cliff during winter's hold tend to wonder if there will be enough light. It's almost time to move the plants indoors; it's almost time to shiver. The sky is always cold.

Ginger tea these days and yoga instead of running. Swelling under the knee and an absence in my heart. Besides, I was only ever running in one direction.

towards October / her flag on fire / maple dusk

Tucking Into Breastbone Hollows

Unwinding ribbons of sun, earlier and earlier. A young rabbit moves in mute from stepping stone to stone. To see one another and move on seems to be the path. Already, acorns.

We called Gibson “the fifth child” on account of how much Mom made him a priority. His ashes will come back next week to be buried under the upper deck stairs that face the lake. He literally dug his own grave. The dogless silence fills her house now.

Perhaps the time has arrived to become less earnest. A perpetual benediction swirls in slanted sunlight streaming through the room of glass. Isn't reading generally a means to attain? And so what is writing? There is a great fatigue swelling in the actions of my day. The ego bleeds, you know.

It's colder now. The empty fireplace waits on winter, waits on its savior moments. Flowers gasp and sweatshirts exhale the darkness of drawers. Darker days express the need to stay awhile. And yet. A woman wraps beautiful scarves over her nape and tucks the coils into breastbone hollows. The fabric is comfort and shield and camouflage. In all its undoing, autumn allows this.

The tick of my father's watch – he sutures what is always fleeting. The smell of hospital and disinfected hands and Polo aftershave would sting my nose when his mustache pricked my cheek long after bedtime. He stayed long enough for two ticks of the second hand – leather strapped, gold, square-faced Timex, tick-tocking in the silence of my room.

Lately, Sinéad. Her public expressions of mental illness are arresting. I remember remember the things that she screamed into my adolesence. I remember her red voice, the color of love and rage. The color of excommunication. The color of my hair.

Now it is the color of wine in the darkheart of night on the back porch watching the last of fireflies mingle over the creek. One doesn't discount the distance, you know. There and not there, a cartography of sentences spool down the long corridor. My east and eastward. Into sunrise, into light.

As a small rabbit warms each stepping stone with quiet insights, so too my small racing heart settles into a muted lull. Yet even in one thousand years I will not forget how it feels to melt away under warmth of scarves and fireplaces and dogs and the candle-softness of daybreak on my face.

Finding the Fulcrum

Today's coffee in yesterday's mug. Sipping the colder mornings means finding the fulcrum between crisp relief and the coming frost. Staring through glass at that which will wither soon. Stroking my hair: God, I hate when I cut it.

Food is stored in the bathroom shower off the kitchen because there is no pantry. Maybe some day a kitchen with a pantry; this and other dreams that counsel through long, pending winters. For the cook who would rather be cooked for, the kitchen is a hearth of loyalty – a place of commitment and sacrifice and dutiful offering. At times, a noose. And at others, a tainted swale of creativity and benevolence. Every meal, every day, I construct polders and other contrivances. Please don't eat rice, okay? The arsenic levels are too high. Quinoa will get the job done.

The humidity has broken and in the screaming brilliance of luminance one could almost cower. Pacing the stepping stones in and out of mottled light a thought presents a successive unfolding – where are we now?

Maybe lasagna tonight, maybe my mother's goulash. All days are dictated by the other's needs. The dog cries for food in the morning and the flowers need water. The husband invites a wife into his half of the bed. The children need shoes or a saxophone repair or a snack. A friend asks to have wine at sunset in the room of windows. My self-sense is revealed in the community of selves. Is this a choice? This and other ways to map the interior of the collective.

The days that readers don't read. The letters writers don't send. The way August both pulls long like taffy yet is eagerly consumed. This is how sentences beg.

bees
satellite the pine
in and out of sunlight's favor –
I watch what I cannot touch
I touch what cannot be seen

The Weight of Unknowable Alteration

Under broken moonlight, always-already.

The fatality of summer shouldn't matter, yet we interfere.

Water / prune / harvest.
Love / look / write.

The dog wants to go running with me but it is too hot for too long. She cries in the outset and later curls into herself like a cinnamon roll when I return.

Lately, apples and their seeds. One's fingerprints on what is thrown away or cast aside matters. The vision or touch or hearing of a thing transfers a weight of unknowable alteration. In this awareness, the witness loses herself and becomes. This-ness. Then, what need is there of God?

All night long, a steady hardiness pushes the rain. A turkey and pepper jack cheese sandwich at 3 a.m. - I'm not always vegan. Not following the rules does not make one reckless. In this way the night veil is instructive. Is it even possible to touch by accident?

Morning remains dark and rain strikes metal eaves like an erratic tympani. The room of windows is a harbor whereby I can see and hear and smell the dampened fusion of nature and humanity. Kyle has placed a Tibetan singing bowl in the room – a surprise donation of that which he no longer needs. I am bewitched by it and open a full-hearted portal. My wedding ring disturbs the vibration of the bowl. 

I remove it.

Prayers for peace erupt out of Kenya because it is election time again. Day to day, the memory of the 2007 post election horrors no longer finds me. But those of us who endured arrive instantly when the pleas and fear and heightened vigilance soaks the airwaves. I do not pray but easily slip back into the reverberations of automatic weapons and machetes and screams in the night.

Waiting was the most terrifying; for when the mobs breached the silence, it was time to flee or hide or fortify. When tear gas exploded it was time to run. When gasoline and food and water and cell phone air time was cut off, it was time to conserve. When severed body parts mingled with mud and sewage and blood, it was time to vomit and grieve.

But when there is silence, nothing can force the blackness of war out of room.

There are four boys who live behind the privacy fence in our backyard. They've built a citadel with roofing and zip lines and lookout towers, all taller than our one-story house. Their ninja warrior course is in use well into the night, and they shoot Airsoft guns for hours and hours that replicate AK-47s.

They play at war. Their father is proud. And the mother yells at the boys from some inner room to include their baby sister.

Pray if you want. But somewhere along the line your god told you that all of this was okay.

Midmorning the rain slows beyond a hush. Kenyans are voting and waiting. And I am going outside to sweep overshot Airsoft pellets off my rotting deck.

A Fine Line

Rain pushes through the kitchen window to mingle with freshly chopped dill; the intoxication is complicit. Washing the dishes, I think about a friend who is contemplating a fine line. She asks if she is crazy. We are always seeking our own permission, no?

A cold front carves space to breathe. My chest takes none of it for granted. Long inhalations coincide with a rustling of the damp leaves and branches in a crescendo of wind and rain and a million green hands waving in forbearance. If I wrote a letter to Nobody and put a blue feather in the folds, would you know that I sent it? Empty envelopes at rest in a tight stack – who knows how far it will all go? One thing is for sure, it was made to go.

I consider a nap before company arrives but I cannot settle. Instead I plug in the string of Moroccan lights and adjust the playlist to “chill.” Vodka tonics with lime. He still has his French Canadian accent and she couldn't resist my daughter's saxophones. The night warbled with music and conversation like the sounds of a party drifting across the lake.

Morning is parched. Water tainted with vodka in last night's mason jar. The sixty degree morning blares an autumn reverie. We walk it off, the dog and I.

The manure and onion tang in the air signals harvesting of the muck fields. On the later run, the thought occurs to me that the very act of conditioning the body may be adding to the shaky feeling that I am not okay the way I am. Yet with each stronger stride, I feel closer. To owning the recognition of my image. To erasing the safe distance. To tasting the destruction of woman who doesn't know for sure. The paradox fuels a further experimentation with pursuance.

I'm closing in.  

So I Sew

Green's terminal canopy.

Ivy pulls the fence apart far enough to piece it all together. Striations proxy as the whole. Perhaps seeing each other with eyes is the same deficit as knowing the other in the dark. So I sew the distance.

Too many beers in, Tom Petty cover tunes. And then R.E.M. A man at the bar had the same shirt on I did - the gray one with the white elephant. This one goes out to the one I love...

The smell of fresh dill is August and I would love August if it didn't precede the months that lead to winter.

Morning light and I jog the wooded trail. The faster the run, the less a heart breaks over blushing leaves and forgetful blooms. Queen Ann's lace, chicory, and black-eyed Susan – such a regrettable name for a flower. The colors of leaving.

Finally, rain. Cerulean hydrangea heads tap and bow under curtains of lowering relief. The glass room off the back of the house almost makes me part of the storm. I guess I love the release of a deluge. Sheets of water spilling over the eaves splatter into the thirst. My thirst; can we talk about it?

Whatever is outward has embroidered an internal map on my watery heart. No matter how many times the course is shred, a reckoning comes. I will take “no” for an answer but the cartography still keeps my gaze east. My feet prepare. My knees bruise. My throat still whispers a thirsty consent.

Rainwater burns off the pavement and Thursday resumes. In a misted offering, the question I refuse to entertain shimmers in a prismatic curve. One waits on universe and needles the future to pass the time.

Getting Some Where

Adolescent bluejays every where. They compete to be heard with a neighborhood of generators and the racket is difficult to assimilate. After the outage, there is a feeling of being better off without the reliance of convenience. I've said as much, but the scoffing! Take it all away and see who remains.

Too much red wine. Too much. Red. We spiral in a place that doesn't exist. Our fingers don't lace; our heat doesn't intersect. Maybe.

I remember taking the sleeper train from Cairo to Aswan to meet the riverboat that would eventually pull us back north on the Nile through the desert. Moving from train car to car meant stepping over the open tracks racing with fury and roar, and the only reason to do that was to use the bathroom. The train bathroom was an open hole elevated only two feet above the speeding tracks. The floors were sticky with urine and wind would cut upwards through the hole. All night the train threw us back and forth in our bunks, our tossing and turning punctuated with screeches and clunks and station stops. The children woke several times in asthmatic sputters; it was so hard breathe.

And I remember the men speaking Arabic when we arrived in Aswan, all of them looking at my daughter. They spoke to her directly and it was unnerving to not understand what they were saying. We kept both children tightly between us. A tour guide collected us and showed off his very best English as we tried to process the foreignness of every single thing.

On the riverboat, Cleopatra sang me to sleep as I pledged my soul to her reign. Papyrus fanned back and forth along the banks, but Egypt relented nothing. Hibiscus tea washed down a bleeding sunset, the likes of which could never be approached with words. There were no signs or billboards, no buildings or other river traffic. Shepherds in robes waved from time to time and children gathered to cajole our attention. Otherwise, it was the sound of the river going some where.

Eventually we docked to catch a bus to the Red Sea. After driving 6 hours through the Arabian desert, I waded into the sea. And it did not part for me.

Today, apple pie for breakfast. A swelter returns a few days after the storm; the azalea droops and curls its leaves in the heat. Summer proves to me that life is going some where. Planting and growing gets us some where. Watering and swimming takes us some where. Wearing less clothes gets us some where.

The here I can not forget.

Railroad Ties and Tiki Torches

Before blacktop, I remember the gravel driveway edged with impossibly heavy railroad ties. In July's heat the smell of an oiled past would boil to the surface of the oaken beams to sting my eyes.

I remember catching my first water snake with skittery hands, saucer eyes, and a hummingbird heart. Grab it by the back of the head! Its perfect calligraphy spread across the shallows until it paused, perhaps sensing my wild intent.

My father left for work before dawn and returned long after we were all in bed. I would be half-conscious of his goodnight-kiss-mustache tickling my cheek. The hints of his Polo cologne lingered longer than he did. On his days off he would wash, polish, Armor All and detail the interior the cars. Once, my bike's kickstand gave way and fell against his fully restored, freshly washed and waxed, MGB. With an overhead heft, he threw my bike out of the garage in a roar. I remember the hot lightening of shame and anger striking my breastplate every time I rode that blue bike with wildflowers on the seat.

Summer was also my mother managing my brothers, keeping them from the lake's edge as they toddled and tumbled from one mischievous plot to the next. One summer she returned to school. She took dental hygiene classes during the day and stayed up late into the night at the dining room table carving molars out of purple and pink wax. The baby sitter she hired was the most beautiful person I had ever seen and I remember rifling through her makeup bag in wonder. She told my mom some of her makeup came up missing.

Summer was rescuing box turtles from Hastings Point road and watching small bass dart from under the dock at dawn. Summer was running away to the cradling tree overlooking the whole lake. Summer was the blossoming potential for openness and the instinctual urge for metamorphosis, met with rules and anger and curses . . . I hope you have a daughter just like you some day! Hot tears, hotter loft bedrooms, and the fiery discomposure of discovering how to be. Summer was.

Yet summer also was that wet, swimming kiss in the glowing green space under the raft. And the belted kingfisher keeping vigil on the high branch over the lake. Summer was my first poem and it was in the summer that I screamed across the lake: I will never, ever kill a bat again! 

I am not on the water anymore but am nearby. Now there are fanning pine boughs and cardinals bathing in the creek and ivy climbing up oaks and privacy fences. There are fireflies and tiki torches and wine on the back porch. Summer is less odium, less feet slipping on the gravel, less sunburns stinging the descent into dreams. It is rabbits in hastas and coleus planted in an old fruit crate.

Summer now is all so safe.

Leaving Graves to Gape

Holding still for east, a garbage truck rumbles the reminder that I have forgotten to put out the trash for the second week in a row. A long, exhaled shit. The week darts about like moth – full of backward glances and future charms.

Sunburns / bluegills / bourbon-barreled beer on the dock.

In the water, my skin cools to become landscape and horizon. Effortless. Everywhere.  

Lately the trees stand still. Heat draws out the winter like a salve. But winter is still here in this sentence. It's July already and the urge to measure and conserve and savor is still choking the praise out of my neck. Summer has its own set of commandments and I am walking along the edge of the lake still wondering if it is too cold.

Last night's storm erupted from nothing. At 3 a.m. the sky broke open and poured down green disco flashes and half-dollar hail. The wind conjured fists full of debris and wouldn't stop hurling. Couldn't stop hurling. Ancient oaks crushed the earth leaving their graves to gape. We won't have electricity for 72 hours but we also don't have a 90 ft oak slicing our home in half.

Morning reveals an altered land. Instead of walking past 45 oaks on the way to Rush Creek Park, I walk past 41. Decades of life now in decay. A grief welters in a pit where the tree's placenta used to swim.

Sometimes she is on the edge and looks over to realize that the edges are many. The tree's roots are legion. The deaths suffered are infinite. Today, amongst the ruins, my body and I must accept the inevitable fall I'm going to take.

Midnight's Inky Bleed

Walking Hermitage Point, some things have changed. A few houses are gone and a few are much bigger. The gravel road widens in places as if to accommodate a larger life. Some trees are missing / me / the way I was with them. Still though, the kingfisher perched on the high oak branch that leans towards the lake. And still again, the trails that ask one to remember the climb and the view and the reasons for seeking aloneness in the first place.

On the last piece of dock, the wood slats press hard into my shoulder blades. The lake quiets to the sound of spaces between the rocks along an ambling shore. My chest tracks the bear across midnight's inky bleed, and she consumes all that I offer. How many galaxies are in one bear's belly? A fish jumps, breaking glass. And yet, what if Polaris told the whole truth about where we were going?

Nowadays alcohol just makes me tired. I sip the last bottle of my favorite stout and feel disappointed it's gone. They've left to watch fireworks and I'm gratefully alone.

Earlier, when Lou showed me his garden, he said the straw bale tomatoes aren't doing so well and by the way, the dog died last week. Thank god the heart is a soft-sided muscle because what was full in the purple bean patch is now empty at his companion's grave. R.I.P Molly and tomatoes and the woman who died in an accident on the lake. How holiday noise covers the grieving masses.

I slept in the loft. Even against the forty year old dark brown shag carpeting, a handful of black wasp carcasses on the floor caught my eye next to the bed. The same knotted faces in the A-frame pine ceiling that stared me to sleep as child still looked blankly into my now older face. Bats scratched and squeaked in the attic, just like before. Although, nothing feels the same. After a confrontation with Dad whereby he acquiesced in unrepentant submission into the very old chair, Jessie shook hands with Jessica in a new alliance of faith.

Fireflies resting on daylight's window, a lone mallard skimming night's lake. Pitch forward – pull back – the axis gives nothing to the yaw.