& still, the waves

One day you’ll have whatever it is you’re now so confusedly seeking. That kind of calm that comes from knowing oneself and others. But you can’t rush the arrival of that state of mind. There are things you only learn when no one teaches them. And that’s how it is with life. There’s even more beauty in discovering it for yourself, in spite of the suffering.

I am still scared, but i am just as angry and evil as i am scared.

Yes, all my life I have gone in terror of festered wounds, I who never festered, I was so acid.

If we have no compassion, we will suffer alone, we will suffer alone the destruction of ourselves.

& how when we left there was a white-haired lady, funny in the parking lot, feeding pigeons with the bread from her fanny pack, in front of a big truck she paid no attention to though it was waiting for her to move & my eyes caught a flood & I turned looking for someone who would understand I’d just seen my angel throwing bread down to the pigeons just kindly, slowly. & you, without my saying a thing, as if you heard the chest its joy & cardinal, you said yeah, just that. How marvelous. Ordinary. To get to see & turn around, & know somebody else was seeing, too. One day it will be otherwise. I always meant to thank you for that. Thank you. What is close to my heart is that woman, that city, you, that noon on the dry land dressed in pigeons & daylight, the dry land dressed in our brief lives, our lives brief & miraculous, as the bees.

So still so sunny and so Sunday is this early day, what’s done needs to be silent: a white butterfly by the red fuses of the fuchsias.

A woman must stay alone for a long while until the hate men have for women has left her, and even longer until the jealousy women have for other women has left her, and longer still until the anger her children have for her has left her—until she is no longer a woman altered by the resentment of men, women, and children, no longer what others have forced her to be, but empty as a skull or a shell, filled only by whatever she pleases, forest air perhaps.

It is so short and jumbled and jangled because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds.