All of my life I have entered into the ceremony from this door, toward the
east into red and yellow leaves.
It has always felt lonely though there were always messengers, like the
praying mantis on my door
when I opened it this morning. Or the smell of pancakes when there were
no pancakes, coffee when there was no coffee.
I walked through the house we had built together from scraps of earth and
tenderness, through the aftermath of loving too hard.
You were showering to get ready for war; I was sticky from late storms of
grief and went to look for poetry.
Each particle of event stutters with electricity, binds itself to coherence.
Like the trees turning their heads
to watch the human participants in these tough winds turning to go, as they
continue to send roots for water making a language for beauty
out of any means possible though they are dying. Everyone is dying. I am I
am, deliberately and slowly of this failure to correctly
to observe the ceremony of letting go ghosts of destruction. I walk carefully
through the garden, through the hallway of sobbing and laughter,
the kitchen of bread and meat, the bedroom of desires and can see no
ghosts though they will take the shape of objects of ordinary living.
There is no poetry where there are no mistakes, said the next messenger. I
am a human being, I said.