I am lazy, I only want to talk about love. When we talked it interrupted, and I would never know what it meant. But I never got used to the sound of the magpie it set my skin on edge, it called like a child like a dog like the wind caught in a fence. I never know what to say or not say, what to honour or betray in any given day. I drag every river for meaning, scrape my hand on every ceiling. But then again, I don’t understand anything the way I’m supposed to. It seemed like a shame, to give it a name. I thought about the man who called it a magpie confronted by the great expanse of his ignorance, he wanted to name it, to detain it, forever in that small phrase. “It was a magpie”, you told me, as you handed me a coffee, “the black and white bird you see in city parks.” And you pointed out the window - looking straight in at me - a black and white bird sitting on the fence. Running like water, two toned, and tangled like a wire, flowing, jangled, many sounds at once. I was woken up in the early morning after my flight, by a sound I could not grasp, I did not recognize. While the swallows go on singing, all the same songs that they always did. I brush the water from my skin, and I walk straight back in to the river I was swimming in. Go ahead and pretend it is how you see me best. But in another life - I might reach out to touch, and feel only calm. My t-shirt was wet upon my back, as you insisted you’re so kind to me. In another life - I might trust you in the way I cannot in this one. A body puckers the surface to take a breath. I can’t even watch the starlings fly when I know I can’t can’t count even on this, tangle of grasses. But everything depends on it still, if we don’t argue they will. And when they hold the election, this argument may end. But there is no other there, that I have found so far, no any other anywhere, but here. Like when you close your eyes - those stars don’t guide you anywhere. I try to really see the beauty, the blue and green, and light green, and yellow green, and blue green and grey green, and muddy green - but all I can see today is black. Water striders, mosquitoes pierce my jeans. I should turn this thing off, I know I should give it up, So I took a walk down the road, and at the bottom of the hill, a muddy river overflowed, and a swamp in the eddy had filled the ditch with bullrushes and reeds, black water puckers with bodies. Online, we talk, or say we talk, mute and block. I obliterate your positions, and you know just how to obliterate mine. The year was unrelenting, we argued all the time. And then they, too, were gone, to help someone else, somewhere down the road.HOW IS IT THAT I SHOULD LOOK AT THE STARS He brought his father, Rick, and an old, brown dog named B.J., and we told duck hunting stories and I don't think any lies, but it was hard to tell over the roar of the saws. That first afternoon, I straightened up from tugging on an unmoving limb to see Allen McClendon, the husband of my son's music teacher, saw through a tree that blocked my drive. Every church group in Tuscaloosa, it seemed, clawed rubble out of my yard, or out of the playground across the street, meaning I can never again say anything mean about the Episcopalians. I hope they are reading this, men and women who lifted and dragged tons of trees, and almost killed me and my stepson Jake, trying to keep up. Some came, worked like a dog, and vanished before I could thank them. There are too many to list here-I would leave someone out-but they came, capable men who knew how to run a saw, or twist a wrench. Within a minute of stepping into my yard, I was met by a never-ending stream of neighbors, some I only slightly knew, who left their own crises to help me clean up mine.
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