Each morning I gather mosses…

Each morning I gather mosses, even in January, even when bending to customary tasks. Washing dishes, I touch the moist earth. It’s a game I play to keep alive.

**

Generally, I think human beings would be better creatures if they talked with their feet.

**

Go on. Push the child you once were into the deep end. The kid will do fine.

**

A memory: just before heart surgery (mine), one of the hospital interns who spoke no English tried talking to me using a translation app on his iPhone. But I couldn’t read it. I was thinking about the probability of death. And we couldn’t talk.

**

Now give me that damn candy and leave me alone!

**

Trying to live well and grieving all the time. You’re one of them, those others.

**

You know all those “top ten” lists. Here’s a new one—top ten dream clots:

1. Talking to a dead mother on the phone while a dead father stands over your shoulder and tells you what to say…

2. Buying strange bread in a foreign land with your hands tied behind your back and a gag in your mouth…

3. Old acquaintances gathered in a gentle place, a room with soft lighting, and all the old wounds and wrongs have been forgiven. Trouble is, we were in a funeral home. And one of us, probably me, had tracked dog shit all over the fancy carpets.

4. You’re pretending to see as you did during childhood. You’re in the softball game. Nothing you do will lead to a good outcome. But you want so desperately to fit in.

5. A train and you’re on it. Perfect. And your uncle who was sinister in life is next to you talking about vodka.

6. Dreaming
   Of the little girl
   Who was beside me
   In the infant hospital
   All those years ago
   Blind children
   Side by side
   Her singing

7. Savage laughter
   You see yourself in mirrors
   Them ovoid ass bad pants
   A mannequin’s poor dream

8. Mozart

   Improbable yes but I dreamt of him
   And though we were in a room
   Rain fell and it was beautiful
   Water coursing down the walls

   “We only get so much”
   He said—“opera is for the young”
   “String quartets, for dying”
   He was there alright

I tend to not have nightmares. My dreams are odd though. They tend to be like Elizabeth Bishop’s poem about waiting for the dentist.

1.

I recognized they weren’t living men
There was a blind man there, not me,
And he had a dog, not mine
In the cafe
With red curtains
My twin brother
Who died at birth…