(It's really the end that gets me.)

A Blessing
James Wright

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl's wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

Wait for summertime.

Well, that's it. Here it is. I've hit my happy peak for the day. This is so, so great.

Seeing more than you care to say.

You girdled sorrow.

(St. Joseph Pier Lighthouse in Michigan, frozen after a winter storm in 2010.)

It was the happy hour of assault and the kiss.
The hour of the spell that blazed like a lighthouse.

Pilot’s dread, fury of a blind diver,
turbulent drunkenness of love, in you everything sank!

In the childhood of mist my soul, winged and wounded.
Lost discoverer, in you everything sank!

You girdled sorrow, you clung to desire,
sadness stunned you, in you everything sank!

-- From "The Song of Despair" by Pablo Neruda

That's hard for me to do.

Heat hangs limply on summer's rusty old hook, and you can feel it in the house, a kind of dead weight slapping against the wall with the turn of an old fan. It's hard to be in this heat, reduced to a kind of human existence defined in its simplest terms: human, existing. Eventually sleep is the only logical option, because what else would you do, and you curl up into the too-small loveseat and wait for the heat of the day to finally dissipate, and it does, just enough to sleep fitfully until a yowling cat wakes you up with restless needle paws.

Gah, the horrible effort it is to pull yourself up from that couch in the morning, even while the air is blessedly cool for now. Your eyelids scratch against your eyes, crusty with the allergies aggravated by the dust kicked up by all the whirling fan blades. Somewhere down the hall your children are sleeping in an icy blast of a room cooled by a window air conditioning unit. Your husband is sleeping on the other couch, a fan pointed directly at his face.

And now work. You go and you try to pull forward and feel some terrible force pulling in the opposite direction, and you spend all day grinding against that force, never really getting anywhere and getting worn out in the process. And then you go home. To that warm, awful house.

It will cost you thousands of dollars to fix this air problem. Dollars you don't have in a home you have trouble with. So you jump into the work and grind away and you never really get anywhere, do you.

Do you.

This has not been a lovely week, not at all. But here you go: Your daughter spontaneously kissed you last night, once on the arm. She never kisses -- despises kisses -- and she kissed you. And she said, "That's hard for me to do," in a small voice. And who cares about any of the rest. Who cares, who cares.