This is a good place to start. This is another beginning. Heard Return of the Grevious Angel on WDVX recently. I cannot listen to that song without thinking about my long-lost Mitch C.
I have never stopped believing in us as a true thing, even when I couldn't be true, didn't know how to stick and stay steady. I was too young to know to love beyond myself.
We made love in a raft on the Saline River one summer night and that starry lovemaking has stayed with me as the template of all lovemaking. The ten-thousands of things that I've seen and had and found and walked away from could never compare to the simple stars that floated around us in the dark water while we found such pure thrall.
I suppose we all have those times when we look back and know for sure that nothing will ever quite be the same after...
I walked away from that man twice.
Singing and not singing, crow is a disaster of noise. How is it that I'm drawn from my comfortable bed to sit at the window and wait for the inevitable fly-by, wings flapping light through the black, black feathers?
I'm needing to understand what I require for my living.
Should I go to Costa Rica?
Is it time to live alone, married or unmarried?
What is my work now? What am I meant to do?
Dreaming last night, the elevator was going down into the basement floor: I was afraid to ride down the last floor -- but I went in spite of the dread. What I found was a funeral cake and of course it was delicious, as food is after any loss.
I am afraid to go to Costa Rica, to change my life, to leave my friends and comfort and the familiar world of east Tennessee. I wonder if I will find myself stepping out of a plane into the wet heat of another place and feeling another rhythm that brings me into alignment with that land.
I will not make the best of things.
It will either feed my soul or it isn't meant for me to be there.
I will not endure as my mother did-- wishing that my father would die first so that she could have some good years alone-- and getting breast cancer in the meantime.
How should I compromise that which is my life?
What happens when I no longer have a home to come back to?
I can always:
Fly away.
(But there will be nothing left here to fly back to...)
No home
No job...
I can always:
Start over.
Build a new life.
Find a new way of being in the world.
(It is frightening and exhausting to imagine...)
My horse and crow nature, shy of new things, quick to leave, quick to gallop away.
But then...
"A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one..."
Wallace Stevens (1917)
Just my grievous fucking singing about the way things might have been, the way things might turn out. The fear in the middle.
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1 comment:
This was really pretty good. Or I should say I liked it. I don't know what is in Costa Rica or even much of what is in Tenessee. I do know what you have in your heart and it sounds good and restless.
Who knows? Maybe it isn't about love at all or it might be love for yourself. I can understand the idea of one true love that none will compare to. Every man would like to be thought of that way you think of him at least once in their life.
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