Retirement Savings

The shapeless lean of a gray sky: car after gasoline-burning car goes by, making the window dark and light as the reflected light from the pavement is blocked, and released.

Wealth wears away with the husking,
and the thresher shares with a nesting mouse,
who adores the English mysteries.

It's not a lot that she's risking:
She lines the bed for her and her spouse
with the fur that flies when they sneeze.

By a heap of kernels she's basking--
settles into A Death While Hunting the Grouse,
and takes her granivorous ease.


Happy Tuesday! May all things beautiful and wonderful come to your door, plain or decorated, bare or disguised, and may the sorrows pass gently with time.

Good Friday

The sun of April is ardent still, and good,

and the furrow of expectation shines;

but today do not fill its longing breast,

because Jesus suffers.

Do not stir the earth. Let go, meekly,

the hand from the plow; abandon the fields

when they are already returning to us the hope

that even Jesus suffers.

Already the blood has run under the olives

and three times he has heard one he loved deny him.

but -- rebel of love -- his heart still beats,

still suffers.

Because you, harvestman, sow hate

and I nurse my rancor at dusk,

and a boy walks like a weeping man,

Jesus suffers.

He is still on the wooden frame

and his lip trembles with terrible thirst.

I hate my bread -- my verse -- my happiness,

because Jesus suffers.


~Gabriela Mistral

A Good Life

Well. Let's start back at the beginning, then, before the dreams flickered to a faint blue life, and then died again. There is the sound of a snare drum, just keeping the time, a little cymbal to mark the measures, maybe. Just so. Only this, and so much. There was a time before: and it was much like this.  

Circle back. The problem, then as now, was the tyranny of habit. A chained dog will not stop chewing its paws, no matter now much they hurt. But the solution is not to pepper the paws, nor to call the dog to reason. The solution is to unchain it and let it run.

Let it run. A dog needs to run.

Suddenly I am not in love anymore, though, and I have been in love all my life. It's a shock. It's not that I don't love anyone: I love as much as ever, probably more than ever. But the infatuation, the conviction that my happiness lies in being seen for what I am (or for I might be) by some one particular person, who has gathered into herself all the importance of the world -- that has vanished. And I've never been without it before.

I talk of circling back. But if I don't have that to circle back to, what do I have?

Well. Two hands and a cloudy sky. What did I ever have?

The toms add in to the snare, the complexity builds. If we had a horn player or a guitar, it would be near time for them. A bridge, and a hesitation --

The rain in my face, or the moon trawled by cloud nets on a windy night, or one blue star, where I'd thought the evening or the morning had broken itself. 

But not now, not yet. Somehow, not even yet.

If it is not, now, to please the beloved, then it must be for something else. For the rain or the cloud or the moon or the star itself, maybe. THUD and there goes the base drum, and long wavering roll, the sharp raps of the rim shots. How long since I have danced even a shuffle? Years. 

But if there is one stone to keep hold of, it's just this: that I am free. Just in the simple terms that might be set for a middling-old American white guy. Nobody has much of a hand on me. I should recall myself, and come back. Back to Start: but not, this time, as a moon-puppy. As an ordinary man with a beard on his face, walking around the block one last time, with no one to please and nothing to fear. I don't need to chew my paws any more. It's been a good life. It's a good one still. 

Vulture

A math teacher stooped in his pulpit walk:
as he turns he lifts one dull black tine
(a primary feather, like a sprig of chalk)
and slowly underscores the horizon line.

He is deliberate, hooded, ugly, sincere.
There is a beat (stroke of pen, sweep of oar)
in his blood-naked head only he can hear:
this is what it means for an old man to soar.