Summer/Fall 2017
Confessional
I fostered the earth with my pen and a few bright strawberries, gave ink to the stars, bled a little after midnight dreaming of minnows, gave my tears to the river and my keenmost yearnings, wrote nonsensical words of blind utter passion and praise and wild abandon, got down on my knees in the garden and kissed the statue of St. Francis, stumbled around drunk and renting my clothes like a small-time prophet, held a pen over the page before dawn a thousand days in a row, hated the fluorescent lighting of office buildings and all places of official transactions, jingled loose change in my pockets, heard Tina sigh in sleep and felt her dead father’s love come down out of the night to bless her commingled with my own, wrote a letter to my aunt and to my niece with a piece of charcoal, read poem after poem like a starving man whose only sustenance was verb and noun and verb turning into noun, went fishing every hour of every day with my eyes closed in the holy waters, heard my grandfather’s smoke-stained voice from thirty years ago telling me to go even farther and more gently, felt myself in the middle of my life stunned by the beauty all around me and my own wantonness and lust, tied flies with outrageous materials, strands from Tina’s hair, tinsel from a New Year’s eve party, a few of my own eyelashes and torn pieces of rejection slips, foam legs fashioned out of pulverized golf balls, felt rather than saw a hundred shooting stars at once, whispered unto croaking that all of it is good and all of it is sacred, whispered that I’m going now, I’m on my way, knew as if it was given by teeming eternity that to walk through any door is a kind of flying, a kind of blind utter faith with my breathing and hands like birds to guide me all the way home.
[Check out Robert’s back porch wisdom]