* NUMBER 13 I wanted to be able to love well. I wanted the ease of love to show itself. Those lessons escape me now, an old man, not alone but unable to evoke those heady days. Yes, I grow wiser, perhaps and the instinct to give in to forces that rarely even arise anymore escapes me. Lost instructions. Like phantom feelings in lost limbs, or the absence of a target for the object of my sins. Tell me, please how have we surmounted the destiny of lovers who live so long together they rarely must speak when the task is mundane but has become sweet, when the tents must be hoisted or the luggage arranged. I know I have love. I know. These remembrances of some other flare in the presence of what the soul defines as beauty may have passed for good reason. I still have your hand to clasp, I sleep in your complete embrace. But have I been good? Have I made the correct analysis of the heart where no analysis is meant to live? How to connect, how did I connect, how many ways can there be? We will go on, wrapped in each others presence and, something newer, terrified of what we would lose should one of us die as both of us must. Yes, some of the fire has been doused but we sit in these moments more completely embered. *
* NUMBER 14 The Mergansers are courting in the bay. The ice has blown out over night and then blown in again, shining white ships across the radiant blue. The Mergansers are courting in the bay. The entire world is in love or finding out what it loves. Even the bad news… Notre Dame aflame its gargoyles locked in a scream over the inferno… connect us as if we know now what love has been. And what can it mean that we only know these deeply-rooted, prismatic attachments when they threaten to be devoured by something more eternal than they pretend to be? The Mergansers are courting in the bay again. It happens every year but this year they arrived, skidded over the open water, black and white flashes, by the hundreds. If only our own time of love came upon us this way. They seem to know something we cannot: their church of the unknown divine is a giant, frigid lake that has just let go of its crown of ice. Now the sun sets. Orange stripes in the Parrish sky. We are there. All of us, as if the sky at this time of day brings its own cathedral to the fore, burning above a hundred birds that skid off the water and fly away. I stand there with you in this fading drama that we share, wordless now, like air. *