Give Over, Graymalkin

Sunday, Another Week of Life Spent

64 sunday, anOther week Of life spent We lose everything, but make harvest of the consequence it was to us. —Jack Gilbert My wash day. I pinned socks and shirts and briefs between cropped chestnuts, snapped photo with valley dropping behind. What pleasure to not hear my voice until evening. The house is Sunday quiet. I sit or pace a room one thousand years old and am neither happy nor unhappy, lonely nor fully sufficient. A chainsaw distracts from books—words can’t contend. I worry of indulgence at the grocer. Excess, my métier. The confit, blood sausage, duck breast, goat cheese, pasta and et cetera, fresh small peas from the bent ancient who gave me a generous reading of her scales and weights. The mind’s stinginess. The saw stops. Already it is Sunday. The manoir clings dusty and silent in centuries navigated by swallows. Then cutting inevitably resumes—the way things go. I’ll take an unknown path this afternoon, any fine so long as it rises and tortures, makes my bones moan and curse me. I’ll bathe, read, fold rags when they’ve dried. This is how it’s done, see, day to day, something more or other than a blessing. 65 Later we’ll gather at stove and table, tooth the pink, briny shrimps brought over the mountain yesterday from the sea, fat stalks of local asparagus sautéed in oil and garlic, eaten hot with the fingers. And wine, the communal wine. Then alone again I will think of my wife, mother, father, entertain in darkness any visiting shade as night closes over us and blind stars still care for nothing. ...