august truth.

I leave spaces where I once planted perennials. I wish for nothing less than dust. Sometimes I see you in dreams and your movements scare me, and you take things from me, and I regret having left you. But those are only dreams. In the mornings I take time that I don’t have time to take and treat coffee like a religious experience. I found a scared little girl recently copying my words and calling them her own, wearing my work like a cloak. Would you like to copy that down? I have an old lover that travels across the seas for a living and tames lions in the circus but he’s still afraid of going home. I learned lately that I believe in an afterlife, that I believe in good lighting, that I believe in having sex in the car. I look like my mother in old photographs taken outside Carmel and she now looks like her mother who we buried last week. I helped carry the casket and all I could think of were the lines from a poem I wrote in the seventh grade, that and how heavy the metal felt in my sweating hands. A four-year old asked me if I knew when I was going to die. I told her no, and then I wondered if I was lying. The easiest thing for me these days is doing nothing. I’ve mastered stillness. My New Mexican princess that I often hold council with is most likely proud of me. Lately I’ve got a lover that makes me worry less about growing old, staying still, and asking the good hard questions. The ocean baptizes me every time I swim and the mountains teach me how to tread lightly on the earth.