Love is a lumpy thing.
Infatuation is peacock tails,
fountains of rose petals,
always music underneath
like a movie crescendoing.

Love is cutting onions
for supper when you are
already tired. Love is patched
of hope and habit and desire,
a tent mended nightly.

Love is tough as a bone
you gnaw on, suck out
the marrow. Love is a bone
of which you make soup
and, surprise, it sustains you.

Infatuation is fun, a tango
in a grove of mirrors. Love
is just work, what you do
one day after the next
like bricks laid end to end.

In finality, infatuation
leaves you with a sticky
sweet residue in the bottom
of the glass, and love is all
you remember as you’re dying.

- M. Piercy

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You know you’re in the desert when you walk outside under the light in the middle of everyone else’s “rush hour”, and can hear the rhythmic displacement of air under the pumping wings of the raven flying 30 feet overhead.

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It feels like old Montana in the early 1900s out there today; the sun and dust swirling around in a cold wind. Shane, in his ranger hat, out across the dirt and rock driveway, thumping a new post for the old handmade mailbox into the ground.

Sarah’s gone out with her jump rope to supervise, and I stay inside, having already weathered the same cold wind this morning for some photographs, and light the chiminea in the office to work by; not for the light so much as for the warm and the smell.

Sarah rushes in and, throwing her coat and boots on the clay tile floor in a flurry of arms and legs, bolts to the bathroom. The dogs perch themselves at the window ledges on watch for evil rabbits and birds. I have cold apple cider and think about making a fire. The cat lounges on the bed, shifting once in awhile to re-position himself in a fleck of sun, but eventually gives up and goes off to retire in his bed: a small box with pillowed fabric in the corner.

These loose, sticky black keys are loud in all this other quiet, and make the office feel like a lonely newsroom, plugging stories out into the air long before the rest of the world stirs.

The big, gnarly juniper out the window in front of me creaks and bends and scratches against the glass in the gusts. So much warm, glowing amber sun splashing around is deceptive on the other side, but one step out and the crisp cold rushes down your throat, into your ears and up your nose.

A collection of old quilts and blankets are folded and sitting on the table, waiting to be put away. I can hear forks and plates clinking from the kitchen; Sarah’s having her promised piece of banana pie for a snack, keeping one hand free to play a few keys on the antique piano by the window. She’s talking to someone now, Shane must have come in. I can hear him pounding the mud off his shoes at the door of the garage.

My cell phone rings from across the room, and suddenly it’s Sunday morning, deep in February 2005 again.

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I would like to watch you sleeping,
which may not happen.
I would like to watch you,
sleeping. I would like to sleep
with you, to enter
your sleep as its smooth dark wave
slides over my head
and walk with you through that lucent
wavering forest of bluegreen leaves
with its watery sun and three moons
towards the cave where you must descend,
towards your worst fear.

I would like to give you the silver
branch, the small white flower, the one
word that will protect you
from the grief at the center
of your dream, from the grief
at the center. I would like to follow
you up the long stairway
again and become
the boat that would row you back
carefully, a flame
in two cupped hands
to where your body lies
beside me, and you enter
it as easily as breathing in.

I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed,
and that necessary.

- Margaret Atwood

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