Sun Set

Pack the dog in the car, she is confused because she knows how to tell time and this isn't when we get in the car. Gather extraneous errands, all you really want to do is drive into the valley to see the sun set behind these mountains where you shelter, see if Colorado feels different at an angle, see if you haven't tried hard enough to love what appears lovable on pieces of paper. 

You were always bad about loving what pieces of paper said to love. 

I came to the Rocky Mountains to write. Instead it seems I spent the time carving out my insides with a teaspoon, arranging the muscle and sinew and blood in little piles on the deck, moving them around like chess pieces, desperate to knead them into smooth dough, into malleable clay I could sculpt according to another ideal. But these are the chess pieces you were given, this is the only body you are able to play. You father spends his days dying, spends his time bemoaning all that he didn't do, and here you are, 30 years behind and no better. God dammit woman, play your pieces or shut up. 

Somehow, you miss the sunset, catch it in glimpses along a backroad in a Boulder suburb, the dog sleeping peacefully in the backseat. She has no concerns, has accepted the odd outing, knows that as long as you're at the wheel and she is wth you, all is as well as it could be. You realize the sunset wasn't what you came for anyway. You came for absolution, acceptance, came to allow yourself not to fall in love. Your old landlord writes from Red Hook, says if you want to come back in September you can walk right in.

The thing is you already have so much love your heart runs over. 

For anything else to come in now,
it would have to be
fucking
magic.