Lately

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Lately, I want to drink coffee all day and read in the bath and bake biscuits with good butter. I want to wear yellow stockings and schoolteacher dresses that swirl in a bit of wind. I want to be with friends and I want to be alone and I want to drink expensive wine. I want time to not feel so threadbare, so much like skim milk, watery and blue and never enough to cut the bitterness of this world.

Lately, I’ve been watching the view out the window go from black to blue, like a fading bruise, with the sunrise. I’ve been stopping the car to let pheasants pass as slow as they please. On back roads, I’ve been skidding on black ice, but the collision never comes. Just an infinite fishtail.

Lately, I’ve been looking for branches, divining rods to summon something from somewhere. Spirit from soil. Storm from sky. I only take what’s already fallen.

Lately, I write in bed like a Victorian invalid, Virginia Woolf under a sheepskin, warm except for a couple of knobby wrists, cold and exposed. I am butterflied open, pulled between poles, and I remember when I was a kid and I used to fling a leg out from under the covers at night, sweaty and half-asleep, and I’d think of one side of my body as the North Pole and the other side as the South Pole, before I learned that both were frozen places.

Lately, in my dreams, furniture appears in random places, as if to say, home is here and here and everywhere. Open a fridge in a field of wildflowers and find it full. Fall asleep in a bed at the edge of time.