A date with myself...

A late-night solo run to my favorite coffee shop with my best guy on the headphones=bliss. These words-- some of the most centering I know-- were on my mind the entire time.

I Watched A Snake

hard at work in the dry grass

behind the house

catching flies. It kept on

disappearing.

And though I know this has

something to do

with lust, today it seemed

to have to do

with work. It took it almost half

an hour to thread

roughly ten feet of lawn,

so slow

between the blades you couldn't see

it move. I'd watch

it's path of body in the grass go

suddenly invisible

only to reappear a little

further on

black knothead up, eyes on

a butterfly.

This must be perfect progress where

movement appears

to be a vanishing, a mending

of the visible

by the invisible-- just as we

stitch the earth,

it seems to me, each time

we die, going

back under, coming back up....

It is the simplest

stitch, this going where we must,

leaving a not

unpretty pattern by default. But going

out of hunger

for small things--flies, words--going

because one's body

goes. And in this disconcerting creature

a tiny huger,

one that won't even press

the dandelions down,

retrieves the necessary blue-

black dragonfly

that has just landed on a pod...

all this to say

I'm not afraid of them

today, or anymore

I think. We are not, were not, ever

wrong. Desire

is the honest work of the body,

its engine, its wind.

It too mush have its sails-- wings

in this tiny mouth, valves

in the human heart, meanings like sailboats

setting out

over the mind. Passion is work

that retrieves us,

lost stitches. It makes a pattern of us,

it fastens us

to sturdier stuff

no doubt.

- from Erosion by Jorie Graham

Have the lovliest of lovely weekends, my dears. See you all next week.