firefly moon
a rabbit’s high, thin shriek
cut short
***
I keep killing the same fly over and over. Sometimes it’s green; sometimes it’s blue. Its blood is always yellow. And always it returns to the same spot on my knee, rubbing its forelegs together, ready for another taste of my salt.
***
There are still two red squirrels in the spruce grove, one in the trees around Dad’s grave and the other a hundred feet up the hill. This seems unusual given how territorial they are, according to the resident naturalist.
The sandstone slab from down the ridge is doing an excellent job as a reflecting pool. And even when it’s dry, it remains an object for reflection.
***
I’m increasingly coming to prize experiences that I don’t write about and don’t share with anyone. They feel like a form of wealth. Especially after nearly a decade of telling virtually every memorable thing to my then-partner.
***
The first drops of rain start falling just as I reach my front door after a three-and-a-half hour ramble. I stand under the portico watching the sidewalk briefly turn into a pointillist watercolor.
***
I am really feeling this poem by Joanna Klink called “3 Bewildered Landscapes” in Excerpts from a Secret Prophesy. Here’s the third landscape:
STARS, SCATTERSTILL. Constellations of people and quiet.
Those nights when nothing catches, nothing also is artless.
I walked for hours in those forests, my legs a canvas of scratches,
trading on the old hopes—we were meant to be lost. But being lost
means not knowing what it means. Inside the meadow is the grass,
rich with darkness. Inside the grass is the wish to be rooted, inside the rain
the wish to dissolve. What you think you live for you may not live for.
One star goes out. One breath lifts inside a crow inside a field.
“What you think you live for you may not live for.” It’s always such a pleasure to find a poem that says precisely what I need to hear, like meeting a true teacher.
A hummingbird visited the beebalm next to my chair as I was typing that—the last hummingbird visit of the evening. Now a wood thrush is singing from the top of the crabapple tree.
I am still thinking about a photo I took this morning:
Cross, guitar, railroad tracks. All the promise and heartbreak of America in one shot.
I should sell it.