This year as in others couples pass by solicitous and tender to one another. A blond toad touches the broad freckled back of his big-breasted handsome wife; their child returns from the dark water and seeing his hand brushing shoofly over her mother says “ah, a backrub...” Another woman whose plump arms seem distinct from her— swinging animate and outward from her hips in small arcs on their own—returns from the long dock with her dark-haired, mustachioed, handsome husband and gently slips her hand into his, the hand now tamed, unmistakably willful and her own.
This morning a brace of goldfinches rose from the grass when I rode by. Further along the road children waded with their mother into a hedge of berries near the woods on the uphill slope toward the old stables. Berrying. Startled like birds, the whole family clearly in need: dark eyed waifs reach tentatively into the thorny wall, skinny arms extended from greying teeshirts with last year’s superheroes faded and peeling. I pedal through the morning heat, sit here now unsettled, half-hearing the ritual Bach, thinking I was here once. Wondering why do we live– not whether we should, not whether life has value in itself (it seems to), nor whether the good we do others is deserving and good (oh it is!) but to what purpose all this intricate care and mindless passing of time alike. The fragrance of her returning.
Why didn’t you let me die.