December 31st, 2014

It really is glory to glory. I am abandoned to joy. In this year I have learned how small
miracles come at every moment, from the nuances of reconciliation to the nuances
of a love that is not a lover's love but is scintillating all the same, to toast falling on the
floor butter side up. I have watched beauty carve itself into my face and weave itself
into my hair, though this is a different beauty than I have met before. I have learned that
loss has two chapters: the absence of thing, an immediate shock, and then the slow receding
of memory from the thing. Eventually the edges of the space left by both wear down until
they form only a doorway, smooth and sanded, safe to walk through or lean against,
depending on the need of the moment. I have also learned that things take back their names.
Lies do not prevail when we are walking through losses and reveling in the miracle. I used
to say "love" and mean "destruction of ego". Now when my mouth forms the word what I
am really saying is "mystery". And something else: how easily magic is coaxed from the
corner when we are not afraid to open our hand! No seduction is sweeter than that between

this Magic and I - how it bids me follow further into my own chambers...  

December 30th, 2014

What is true of sunrise in winter over the ocean is that the sky is light long
before the sun is born.  As I watch it crowning slowly, and then quickly rising
between two clouds, it is no longer light that is emitted, but fire, and somehow,
in those moments, everything seems darker because the sun itself has appeared
and is so light  the sky, which seemed fully illuminated before, is the color
of a glass of milk into which pieces of ice have melted. Yesterday I sat for a long
time and collected many pieces of beauty and hung them around the living room
so when the low winter sun shone in they would become illuminated. The dust
in mid afternoon light when I was 8, the choreography of a fly, a bird, a plane, all
ticking in time to Sigur Ros in a golden field behind a tobacco barn when I was 20,
the warm summer rain falling into a gray ocean at low tide, all things silver, when
I was 23, and then yesterday, the way it seemed as if the sun itself made ripples
in the sea, every angled wave a precious metal, shimmer before me like standards. 
These are the moments that represent a life. Keep this poem if I leave first.

December 29th, 2014

I want to address this to you Steve, though you have long forgotten our talks and the way they felt both like the velveteen rabbit and a scarlet fever. Never mind, I am happy to have those conversations as references on this map. Over there, by Mt Revelation, on which you said "I don't know who has hurt you to such a degree that you no longer take yourself seriously, but you must stop treating your body and heart casually, and stop allowing men to bruise you" is where I last wore this dress that I am about to burn. It is tight and sheer and it has every vital vein of my body stitched onto it in silver, I guess so the vipers would know where to strike. I have always been very kind to my enemies. Steve, it will make the most glorious snapping sound when it burns, like pine sap crackling or birch bark curling back in flame. I will send you the ashes if you like in a little box. You see, your voice was a hand when I needed one, and a sword knighting me when I needed that. How easily I brandish my own sword now! If I thought it wouldn't terrify your small children or whatever woman you are in love with at the moment, I would send you, in hat boxes, the heads of men who wished to bruise me. And right now, right now, I am sitting by the Lake of Solace and looking into quiet waters which appear gray and then purple and then, suddenly, to spark with the cool fire of a waxing moon.

December 15th, 2014


They are bending over their exams and I should be grading their last papers
so they can fold that "feedback" into the rest of the feedback from me that
I'm sure is very insufficient but instead I am trying to keep my eyelids from
falling and dreaming about the title of a book I might someday write. And,
then, in the middle of it, a text. This text results in a necessary, but unpleasant
conversation. I feel my cheeks grow hot and wonder if the students notice. They
write on, occasionally pausing and resting their chins on their hands. They are
writing about their progress with writing, a meta-analysis, and this is hard and I
watch them strain and I wish I could guide them even now. What they don't know
is that this exam really is less of an assessment of their own knowledge and more
an assessment of my teaching. I have grown miles from this kind of exam. The
texts keep buzzing in. This conversation was dead before it started, but it continues
on, a stubborn ghost. It lasts much longer than their exams, and by the end I am
laughing the nervous laughter of one who narrowly avoided a car wreck.

November 20th, 2014


He told you last night how he bought a rose but how it had died very quickly and how he had removed slowly the dead petals until all that remained was the protected center. The story had touched you, the gentleness of finger, the consideration, but the single white rose, stripped and small, tucked under your windshield wiper and gleaming in the 5:45 am streetlight, was halting and lovely. It made your cold tired face break into a smile, the weariness and gathering age, gently, but immediately, stripped. The man at the Indian restaurant seems very disapproving that I ask for a table for one. I am drunk off just this one glass of wine. And how, I wonder, is this possible oh and now the table next to me is talking about Versace. I feel very cold near them. "I would enjoy it more if it were 3500" he said. He bought the coat, it turns out, at Gods urging. "Does Marriella want to get married?""well, you see, yes she would, but", her father interposes, "it is better to not be married than married to the wrong person". And this is perhaps what I have come to hear. I am now the kind of professional woman who takes herself to dinner to think, and this thrills me to the ridges of my shins, to the tips of my shoulder blades. As I prepare to walk into the sharp night I feel all my points as coordinates lining up with the stars; there is a map at work and I follow its blossoming.

November 18th, 2014

There are some children that aren't really children at all, they are pillars of flame that burn everything they touch and there are some children who are just pillars of ash and they fall apart when you touch them said Sherman Alexie through a character in Smoke Signals and I am shaking with sobs in a down vest that must have been my fathers. It is too big on the shoulders and too tight on the chest and as my body trembles the huge shoulders rise and meet the edge of hair and graze my jawline so the sobbing becomes corrugated sound, like a salt shaker, like tiny pieces of ice falling at different pitches. I dream of South Dakota and skies like blankets. I dream of the wholeness of pitted city streets. This is the second day in a row I have called out. I am not well. The mind, which is eternal wants what is eternal. The hand, which is ephemeral, wants work it can finish. These two fates are ours as humans; we cannot choose one over the other. For the first time in weeks I feel happiness while scrubbing the shower walls of dead skin I've shed, but if I did only this my mind would ache like an old tooth. How everything here in the divided room of this world endeavors to disconnect us from ourselves and still we are expected to illumine! What is a light bulb without the socket!? I do not expect to survive this life, but I do expect what life I live to be alive.

November 10th, 2014

For three whole periods you speak in an accent because you find that it both engages
the students -- who want only to pretend a little longer, to squeeze the last bits
of childhood from their senior year -- and allows you to be better, sharper, funnier
and firmer because there is protection in personae. From behind the accent you do
not blush when you correct them. This cannot last forever, this strange ritual of the
false, but for now you settle into it. You have pretended at many things - pretended
to like the fishing pole, the tool box, the poem, tokens of clumsy love. What you want
is the elegance of a semicolon. You want transition words to slip their long fingers
over your body, between your ribs, along your thigh. You want a smoothing, a sleeking.
You tremble at this desire. You want metaphors to nuzzle your breast and similes to catch
in your throat. You want to be overcome by allusion and style and the subtleties of voice.  
If my brother was an instrument writes a student he would be a loud drum. That's good you
say and she blooms. The room shimmers and moves, the chairs in a sort of dance, the desks
resisting their invitation. You are busy tucking your real self away - mostly your heart.


November 6th, 2014

Full mooned face but not just yet it's tomorrow and you haven't taken the muscle
relaxers but you feel all bent up like a wire hanger that's been through a violent
transcontinental move. You will take them though, in hopes of unlocking secrets
that curl in the center of your sinews and crawl inching through your bones. They
will stuff you up with hot air like a balloon, only you will still end up being the
one the clowns make animals out of, it will still be easy for you to bend in whatever
way is required. In the morning you pull your dripping body off the bed and wring
yourself out - who turned you into a sponge while  you slept? - and you will step
carefully past the puddle and into the shadows of winter dawn. Whatever you find
there will not please you like the muscle relaxers, but it also will not saturate your
body with the loud and pulsing emptiness of drugs. It is more of a filling, an almost
gluttony of every day, the excessses of ugly and beauty. And when you are done with
that day there will be another, and another, each with its own particular high, long
after you have used up the last of the prescription.

November 4th, 2014

The beautiful older woman at the coffee shop compliments me on my purse, which is really more
of a saddlebag. She had one like it in 1969. I wonder how many memories she is fitting into it now
as she stares fondly at the worn leather in the slants of morning light. Later, Genna and I walk to vote,
only I haven't registered so I sit impotently against the cold white-painted cinderblock wall of the church cellar. I think about the steadiness of this church on South Whitney, the faithfulness of it,
how like an open hand it is. How consistently it gives itself to the first of the month food stamps
and voting days, the colored linoleum tiles always bearing all that weight. Once, on a day when
I was sad, I walked home from Tisane in the late afternoon through the back ally that comes out
across from the church. The sun was setting through the window and the bare tree in front of the church was perfectly framed in the textured stained-glass glow. It was either early spring or late fall - some inbetween time I love and feel undone by. Tonight Davia and I walked 7 miles through West Hartford, first the gardens, then the neighborhoods, then the town center; it is like walking through the evolution of culture and society. I say "I'm sorry" in many different ways. I think she hears them all. How quickly silence builds fences! How thoroughly laughter knocks them down!

November 2nd, 2014

The house is so cold I want to burn it down and sit in the
center watching the flame lick through each layer of construction.
Instead I build a fire, close the blinds, boil water, and open the
cellar door because the basement is 10 degrees warmer. I am
wearing three sweatshirts and two pairs of pants. I am wearing
fingerless gloves. I want to smoke cigarettes with you, wearing
fingerless gloves I said once to somebody and I can't imagine,
though I remember, saying it. I used to be frightened of the cold.
Now it is my enemy and I am not afraid to fight. I was made for
this: this survival, this resilience. You win I said to him But you 
never will again although we both knew there would not be another
time. The wood is not seasoned well and it hisses as the heat
enters it; white smoke fills the fireplace. Does it have to be a 
competition? He says. It isn't I say. It's war. Everything is.

November 1st, 2014

You wanted to know how long I would be here
you asked as if the tree wasn’t shedding bark already
as if the dandelions had yet to throw their seed
you asked as if there was time, the golden rod and
sun collecting in the bowl of my belly. Where have you
gone? It’s not that I was waiting exactly, but I wasn’t
moving, still like a deer in the bushes who suspects
someone waits to catch her with his eye. Someone,
on whom I should not be eavesdropping, says Science 
says you could fit all of the planets between the earth
and the moon. I visualize it but even the image is
nothing more than a pretty line for a poem. My huge
book of postmodern poetry sits waterlogged on the
table. It is open but unread. The tea grows cold.

October 31st, 2014

The thing that's really rather remarkable is that I didn't feel the regret
I thought I would when I woke. A steady hum of disappointment
buzzed below my breathing and I felt only sadness for both of us,
all of us, who are less than we are. I scraped the first frost from my
windshield with the edge of a box of chalk - the classroom at the
college has only chalkboards - and watched a car pull up in front
of Josh's house. The driver got out and walked away. My throat burned
in the deep cold and as soon as I could I huddled in the warming air
of my car. I drove to starbucks and got two coffees, one hot and one cold,
because I still don't know what I want in life, and this is a decadence
I can afford. I drive the long way to school, through Elizabeth garden
and the manicured but wild neighborhoods of the west end. The grates
in the road release steam which looks like ghosts of men I've lost. They
appear at first to incline towards my car, but lean away when I draw near.

October 30th, 2014

I have been sick since Saturday, but it's only yesterday and today that I
would admit to it. By Tuesday afternoon my fever spiked and I couldn't
drive and when I looked at faces I swear I saw through skin to bone as
if it were all made of glass and I felt fear and giddiness, a pool of self
and also an unconquorable stone. So, Thursday I sat by the fire burning
paper bags and grading exams because I couldn't do anything else and
occasionally the door would bang and I would twirl around, still slightly
feverish and paranoid. In the afternoon, when the sun dips and hovers but
somehow, this time of year, feels no nearer than noon, Brett came home
to smoke cloves on the porch. My room is clean. My exams are graded.
I have been productive in spite of the virus raging through my body.
I blow into the fire and it blows back at me, a low aching moan. I'll leave 
you to your smoldering logs, Sean says after dropping off native honey
for me and a typewriter for Brett. I wait for things I don't even believe exist.

October 25th, 2014

It is the kind of gray that gnaws at your bones by the time I get home from hiking. The hike, however, was beautiful. There was a golden forest, a bamboo field, many still moments in which I peered through trees looking for a mythical creature. There was even a spear, perfectly formed, which still sits in the back of my car. I watched a hawk circle so far above me that sometimes I was no longer sure it existed. The air was warm and the rock we lay against was cool, so he gingerly, with the sureness of a child, offered me his arms for warmth. It felt not unlike hugging a straw man, but I didn't mind very much as there was nothing to it anyway. When we pulled up to the house the three of them watched and did not wave hello and the gray came then. We sat in a jarring silence, occasionally making small talk like pebbles breaking water until the mushroom lady walked by. I have never she said seen such a crop mushrooms. Strange year. The mushrooms, they are all out of order and schedule because the weather has been so wild. She doesn't say a word directly to me unless I ask questions. She doesn't say anything about the stories she has heard that were weaved from the thin bits of evidence I've left lying around. She makes no comment about the men. The porch splinters. There are ever so many canaries in the coal mine. 

October 22, 2014

4:11: the alarm goes off and I lie in bed with God asking him if I really have to get up and creating
impossible equations in my head if I sleep for 20 more minutes and then work through lunch 
today, what percentage of students in sixth period will get their progress reports? 4:20 a.m:
uninvited, an image of my father's Bible, and then his hands turning the pages, and then his face
over it, earnest. 4:21 a.m. I think of how my father used to be a person, used to be a person in the world, used to be alive. I cry for a moment.  4:30: in the kitchen heating coffee from yesterday in a pan. I make an egg and toast. I feel so fully adult and proud, that it is like washing dishes for the first time. How unaccustomed I am to taking care of myself. 4:47a.m.: I light candles, turn on one light only, and begin to grade. 6:57 a.m. I drive through Elizabeth park to hide in the trees for ten minutes. I sing at the top of my lungs and have this thought if everyone everyday did everything they love and were made to do, for fun or pay, the world would be so much happier. You should write then, I tell myself. 7:15. Walk through doors of school. 11:00 DaVaughn tells me his understanding of paragraph structure has moved from a 2 to a 7. I am thrilled. He is thrilled. This is worth skipping lunch for. 12:40 Daquan looks up at me while working on the review for the exam and says, for no reason, "Miss, I love everyone in the world". I laugh. There is a fight brewing, I am out of ideas for managing this too big and too needy class, someone's phone has been stolen, I don't know who knows paragraph structure, nor why my seniors didn't come to me knowing it, but Daquan loves everyone. There is hope yet. At 3:10 I buy a bagel because I have eaten only breakfast and two apples. I am at the college by 3:30, but this is too late because I must make copies. 3:59 I watch the clock switch to 4:00 while the copying machine whirs out number 15 of the 20 copies I need. 4:10 four students walk in late and I don't feel bad for 3 minute indiscretion. At 4:51 Jaqueena, who missed school today emails me simply "hi" and I know something is going on. I respond. She responds with the sex of her baby. she missed school for the appointment. I am suddenly aware that the future of this child relies on the future of Jaqueena and the future of Jaqueena relies on, in part, my class. My strength is renewed. For Jaqueena's unborn child I will roll this boulder uphill every day. 5:20 Dylan and I sit down to talk. He hasn't been to class in weeks, since the semester started, but his baby, who is almost one, was sick and he was caring for the child. His eyes are watery with sleep because he worked third shift and he is worried. I tell him what he needs and tell him he can do it. I tell him he has to. I tell him he will. 6:10 I get home for the day and call my mother to tell her all the ways education can be improved because behind everything all day it's all I think about because there are minds and lives in the mouth of the same toothless lion that has education by the neck and my mind is buzzing with ideas. 7:30 I take a bath. 8:30 I make tea and fall into bed. I fall asleep three times writing this and I don't have the energy to edit it down to 14 lines. I finish my tea. I have gotten used to drinking tea and water right before bed to flush out my system for the next day. The added benefit is that sometimes I wake in the middle of the night to use the bathroom and, as time alone is so infrequent, I just lie there, in the center of time, feeling held. I am grateful for my home, for my job, for my body, for my bed. I am grateful for the sound of tires through a puddle or the moon through the window. It is a different thing to be glad in the middle of the night when you are free and your mind belongs to nothing but those moments. These are the sorts of things I want to tell my students. Every day is an envelope in which I am stuffing little notes that I hope they open and read when they need it most. 9:50 there is a flash of lightening and soon after a clap of thunder. 9:52: my eyelids are thick. Wake me in the morning, we have an exam to finish writing.


October 19th, 2014

You wrap me in your wind and I want no other arms.
The blades of grass rustle a praise and urge my lips
to moisten with your song. These days are monuments
to what bigger monuments there will be.
You will be first in line
to lead
which means to serve 
He says as I walk back to my car and I am thrilled and
terrified by the invitation. I want only to hide in this
garden amongst the evergreens and under low boughs.
I ran my hand along the underside of the branch and
caught the eye of a passing walker. He seemed frightened
by me. Let me rest in the garden a little longer Lord, but
not forever. I will follow You out into the world's desert. 

September 29th, 2014

Two figures against the backlit church side. They sit on the wall
of a raised garden. One is a round older woman and the other a
skinny child. He crawls all over the garden and makes a game
of his movements. He stops and leans on the woman and for a
moment they are a picture. Then he bursts from her and nearly
runs into the street. The orange streetlight rests on his hair like a
hand. Stop right there, son, it says. And he halts sharply and then
slinks back to the woman who still sits, unmoving, amongst the
silhouetted plants of the raised garden. This animated story paints
itself under my eyelids and I see it still as I slowly turn the corners
to home. In my mind even now the two remain, the boy a trembling
life about to break into being, a tightened string, the woman a rock
around which waves and wind break. They stay like this, turning
slowly and mechanically in my mind, like figures in a music box.


September 23rd, 2014

I can knot my hair on top of my head now. It has grown.
These dreams though, they continue. Two in a row now.
They start in my brain and travel through my body as I
dream them, making my hands open and close like a
fish's mouth, making my legs kick off the blanket, and
in the morning my stomach holds onto the dreams and
I call out of work and cry, except there is no water left,
so this crying is the kind I do in every movement of my
body. It is more complicated now. I am acquiring more
hearts. They hang on a bloody string and I pet them
gently and offer them my own blood when I can squeeze
it from my crumpled, wrung-out heart. There are many
things about this that are wrong - one is the fact that I am
still talking to you in my head and dreams. Goodnight.


September 17th, 2014

Everything is art he said standing on the edge of the sidewalk
Music is art. Fashion is art she offered. Fashion is absolutely
art he agrees. Food is art. These lines in the pavement are art.
The light turns red and we cross in a crowd. It is art that we
cross in a herd; it is art that I walk directly below the stoplights
half-hoping one will fall on me so that I can rest for a little while.
It is art that I always watch the white lines of the crosswalk
below my heels, whether or not I keep to them, and sometimes
I do, and that is art too: when I do and when I do not. It is art
that later that night, though I don't know it yet, Jeremy and Caitlin
and I will drink and then cry together in a movie. We will sob
together over love and birth and death, some of us louder than the
others. Even later we will sit with Alex in a windowless bar and hate
things together. I will lower my head to my arm and count my breaths. 

August 26th, 2014

I was jealous, actually jealous, of the 8th grade boys at the convocation. They
were quiet and well behaved, and yet their sidelong glances, their swallowed s
nickers, their dancing eyes, how light all of these things. I didn't listen very
well to the speakers, the mayor, the superintendent, and neither did these boys
and I felt like I wanted to say, we are together in this, in our rebellion, in our
mirth. I raised my eyes to one of them and he held my gaze steadily; creature
to creature we stared. I could not look away and when I did his eyes remained
on me. It was then that I understood how we are each, every person, a lock.
He wondered what it must be like to be a teacher and I wondered what it must be
like to be in eighth grade, and we sat there immersing ourselves in wonder at
the other's existence. Tomorrow I will meet people I have not yet promised my
heart to, and yet, I know they will have it fully for the next nine months.
Tomorrow I will enter a room full of locks that is waiting to become a room full
of open safes, and I am honored to hold the keys.

August 10th, 2014

What is creator? Pressure heat and time, he said, with the
confidence of a king from his couch. And though he meant
to steal some warmth from the night his words only served
to stoke a fire that was burning very deep, beneath the carpet
and the couch, and the eight floors of apartment. And though
we had danced in hot rooms and and whispered in corners and
ran our bodies over other bodies and away from them, this was
better and worth so much more. With every word you speak you 
lay a path others may walk on. This feels like work, like the
sighing and satisfied muscles after a day in the field, swollen,
breathless, fully aware of themselves and beautiful. When you
crawled into bed finally at 6:30 in the morning, you heard birds
bathing in the neighbor's pool. You fell asleep to a fully risen
sun and wild and secret baptism. 



August 9th, 2014

I got worse at spitting the cherry pits into the flower pot full of cigarette butts on regent
street as I neared the end of the cherries.  I lost the last two pits, one to an overspit and one
to an under, and this seemed important, although I know it's not. The temperature is 84
degrees, but in other words this means I can wear a loose tank top and nothing else as
I sit on the front stoop spitting cherry pits and talking to Brett about love, again. I am
always talking to Brett about love and he is always listening and offering advice, but mostly
the slow nod of companionship and the yes, yes, these are strange things, the desires of the
heart, the impulses of the body. I tell him how attraction doesn't always have to do with the
eye and how I have tried on different kinds of love like dresses and the one that I like best
isn't the most flattering on me. I don't say these words, but he knows what I mean anyway
his nod assures me. Earlier when we sat on the patio David drew a heart on my left arm. It
was elongated in its shape. Now while I sit next to Brett talking about love, he snaps a
picture of the heart and when I see it I think of the verse place me like seal over your heart, 
like a seal over your arm, and how I still have many muscles to tone.

August 7th, 2014

You are my God. Where shall my heart go but to your throne?
I have found it hiding in desert caves on vacant nights and
cowering in lovers' arms when the moon's hollowed eyes stare
blinklessly through the naked window. I have found it wandering
a forest it no longer belongs to in which there are many traps and
the leaves whisper ghost stories to each other as it passes. These
places no longer hold their hands out in gentle invitation, but
rather they offer the embrace of a prison. So, my God, you are
where this lost heart must abide, but to lasso it and reel it in is
work for a strong and fearless one, and that I am not. I will fight
every demon but my own and lie bleeding out my fruitless victory
as the night bears down on me, and that is when they gather, the
bloodsuckers, the thirsty fears. So, take me because I can not take
myself. Here I am, lead me into your courts and burn me clean.



August 6th, 2014

The moon, although it is hazed, turns the tall grasses gold in its almost-full light. The clouds
around it are lit like the edge of the sea that barely reaches the light from shore. This is so 
beautiful you cry, too loud, with a moan that comes from a deeper place than you have known recently, a place even deeper than your well of sadness. Sure Alex says, as if he is so accustomed
to this beauty, that it is a fact and to speak of it is redundant. Caitlin trails behind and takes
pictures of the sky. Your soul feels a little less bruised, it has been elevated and iced and tended
to by them, with food and drink and basketball and a moonlit hike, and no matter what happens,
and even if they don't know it, this is what it means to be okay. Still there are tides coming in at
this time of year that wash away all the monuments to your freedom you've been building out
of sand all summer long. It is hard to hear your own foot fall on the hiking trail and breathe
in the sweet smell of grass and leaves and feel your body respond to the air as it brushes your
neck and breast and not think of him. It's all the moments of the lifetime you lived together, the
small moments, that fall like waves against you, but the rip tide is not very strong now, and you
will last longer than its pull. 

August 1st, 2014

The second campsite offered better sleep, but also, there was less magic. This is okay. Magic needn't be in every place or we would habituate to it and never notice its gentle tickling of our imagination. Joe and I woke, missing Caitlin, and walked down the road to find breakfast. When Joe left I lay around in the tent and the sun half dressed and wishing I was not alone but also very glad I was, and when I wandered in a half-dream to the bathroom a man who spoke with a thick accent was cleaning the sinks. I hope you know why I am here he said. Of course I said, bashful in only my bathing suit but still needing the mirror to put up my hair which has, as I imagined it would, grown out in such a way that it snakes from my skull, a wild brood, I am grateful for clean bathrooms. Well, I will clean it very well then, so you will come back. I smiled and looked down, pulled the final bobby pin from my lips and secured my hair. As I left he yelled Congratulations! You are very beautiful! I walked a mile to a coffee shop, and it was a very long mile, but the coffee was good and the internet was free, and the man with the braided goatee behind the counter was disarming in his desire to serve. Is there a liquor store that is walkable from here? I asked. Yes, he said, I know all of them because I used to go every day and it is something like a wine skin splitting the way his honesty makes me feel.

July 30th, 2014

Perhaps this is when the magic came back. This trip. Things are frightening again in only the 
way that magic can be. She said as she drove through the dark. The moon hung low over the
horizon (the moon was always hanging low on this vacation) which looked like mountains (but
we are by the sea and it is mostly flat here). It was thin and red, a sharp hook that made Caitlin
shiver, and yes, it was strange to see the white light muted by rust and so small. In Chatham there
was music in the park and all the children were friendly to each other. Two boys stopped a couple pushing a stroller to bend their 8 year old heads down to the baby boy and coo and giggle. The
baby reached for their little boy beach hair and they laughed in delight. A family walked by and a lone wail from a child of about 5 rose. My icecream! My icecream! His mother turned and said simply you ate most of it. Now a bird will have the rest and the child stopped crying and quietly considered this as he trailed after his family. Earlier, while we walked through Provincetown a very old man dressed as a pilgrim walked up to us and said "All is well because you three are here". Caitlin believes I was fighting demons in my sleep when I stirred and gasped and wimpered, and always
in the morning, the birds, I swear, were speaking French.