little

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Sometimes I Walk with the Moon

Sometimes I walk with the moon.  Sometimes she walks with me.  I don’t mean we walk in dreams, where dream is trope for something more.  The moon is just the moon.  And, if anything, I indicate the something more.  Or something less.  She shines.  I, well.  Tonight, if I ask every sleepy creature – children, mothers, fathers, dogs – to open up its eyes a little but somehow stay asleep, what will become of me? Shadow, I say.  It is a whispering and it sounds like the wind.  The trees begin to understand in spring.  But now bare limbed they seem dumb.  Sometimes I walk with them.  Sometimes I am beyond their spell.

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It Lives on Sweetness Only

The groundhog knows what love is.  It holds him all winter and wakes him in the spring.  He may look thin and haggard and hungry, but so do I and what is my excuse?  And the hawk understands a little more of love than I could ever bear.  If he seized me now, I’d only scream a little.  Lovers talk about the moon and the sea, but they should talk instead about the humming-bird.  It lives on sweetness only.  And when its heart slows down it’s as if it weren’t alive.  But let me be like the ant, always busy.  Either walking crisscross through the desert of the ceiling or moving my antenna back and forth to warn my queen danger is near.

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What Happens Next

I dreamed I died.  And that was a relief.  There isn’t any trying after death.  My soul was made.  How could death unmake it?  The book couldn’t fit inside the grave.  It had grown in the night.  The wind blew its pages around.  Had I been the tree after all?  A little of my former self remains.  And after all the storms and sunny days, was I the only one who couldn’t attended?  Last night, I dreamed I died and then awoke, not on the other side of death, but to see: the room exactly as I left it.  The furniture standing in its place.  An empty space beside me.  My wife busy downstairs.  My whole life lives inside this house.  My house contains what I call home.  The world lies where my stoop begins.  If I should die again tonight, I know exactly what to do.  If I should wake to find I am alive, then who knows what happens next.