Bellows Falls Library

I try to be present!

Happy Birthday Ian!

Applying mulch to raspberry beds in sweet May's sudden summer heat: forehead drops prayer-beads of sweat into the riotous dandy-grass alive with bees between my brother's australian boot and my brother's australian boot. Eight species of butterfly intimately met over the day, three of them exposed to reversal film, two of them taken onto my finger. No bulls, so much the better. A baby instead. Birdlets' beaks gaping in their nest. A couple dozen good oysters from Long Island Sound.

love for you on motherday

Cold / Caldo /:/ Black / Blanc

Opposition always devolves immediately into something gentler, more complicated, more porous toward the ichors of loving-kindness. That's if the energies of breath are left to their own magical devices; being that our bodies bound breath in muscular constrictions and that from this we tend to generate notions of selfhood identifiable with body, sometimes the fiction of opposition is maintained and carried to elaborate rhetorical ends by parties who feel it auspicious to oppose one another.

The perennial presence of you in me; the continuous vibration of those moments of luminous intimacy, the surprising way they're free to move in time loosely, erratically, irreverently, with rasp of wing-rustle, like how a perfect early Mourning Cloak moves in space. Or like how a Baltimore Checkerspot does, bright and brindled under the light of your lucky eyes that time in the grass above where the sweet and the salt waters mix.

I could mask this. I could pretend that my memories are of my young youth and of Tamara, whose school was across the piazza from mine in Baku and with whom I precociously eloped in the dory we built together over the course of two tense, rainy months; or that this first, indelible, irreducible love was wrought in me by sinewy Rula, the tough fifty-year-old Greek with the disarming serviceberry eyes who'd been a guerrilla leader during the civil war and whom I came to know in her exile in Tashkent through the sister of the tutor I'd engaged on barter-terms to help me with the pleasurably vexatious jargon of Το Χρονικόν του Μορέως.

I can wear a mask, I can put a mask aside. It's you, You are that love, you're the one I think of and dream of, the one my heart smiles at. My whole heart moves out of this body, embraces that one (yours); forgets its place; stumbles; is ecstatic.

I feel your wings moving, you're on my shirtsleeve; the air between your powdery scales and my pale blue squinty eyes is a live, sensitive tissue. Our presence is common. I feel you kissing me, me kissing you, in love, soft mouths, gently, again and again, continuously – even though I'm just here in the sunlight, sitting, and you're just there on my shirtsleeve.

The world is my blank

At loss; shucking Glidden Points. Taking Wellfleets with beer, cheers to lady Lenya. Standing against the gunwale of my dory I send fifteen-foot tongs down into the salt-&-sweet of the harbor's waters, extend my self: come up with half a dozen good Malpeques. Swallow sea, swallow you, drown, in love!

BELLOWS FALLS LIBRARY

dear /brokenheart /gleams of loving /complicated ways /together & rise together, breathe /chosen /frame /as sapwood turns inward and becomes heartwood /losses; loving /lonely too, reading Virginia Woolf, coming home /planty, tenuous /riding my bike /unsettled springweather /connecticut river /gentleness of death /baby /31 /clouds of love /maritimes /Further prospects /brief life /excitement and lightness /measure of heavyhearted sadding /wanting /I most love /gushing spring /beautiful /glad nonetheless /All I can /hardly /let alone /capabilities /buoyancy /hopeful /no place in the world /fairly clear /hold you close /miss /your