I’d like to say

it was her mind, first,

but you told me that lies

are slips into sin.

I’ve been thinking about it a lot

(a lot a lot),

and I think it might even be better

if I could say

it was her hair, or her lips,

or her curves (please

pardon me Father Johnson),

because beauty is good,

from the hand of God,

and is admiring art sin?

But the truth is, Father…

this is very hard…

but the truth is, Father,

mind was third and body second,

because as she stood next

to me at the party in that

tight red sweater,

the first thing that got me was

the perfect knot she tied into that

cherry stem with her tongue.

The glasses are gone, like

the shirt and professional

pretense, for one ephemeral

flicker of the presenter’s avatar:

himself, bare-chested and sleek,

hard like the brick wall setting

off his sun-bronzed skin,

so I wonder, long after he

has hastily clicked away, who

this man is elsewhere,

beyond this Google Meet, beyond

this sales pitch for edu software,

beyond this dim and narrow

room: a man, who meets.

We and the sun, high

as lords, as our frisbee, white,

whirling to my hand—

volleyball, cap/gown

cake, pavilion, dogs, friends, a

baby, relatives—

Another photo:

my grandparents and me, one

final time. Happy.

Photographs are leaves:

colorful and aged, what was,

pressed into a book.

Through my window, snow

frames cardinals, searching bare

vines for frozen grapes.

She smoothed the blanket down his legs and rubbed oil onto her palms. Delicate fingers massaged his scalp. She moved to his back, professional hands gliding over, then firmly pressing aging muscles. Ocean waves rolled within the white noise machine, covering his tears beneath the towel.

He felt touch.

drunk missteps include

acts during, also before:

eating spaghetti

*writer disavows claims of actual events that could have inspired this haiku

It’s the guitar you’ll remember, the lightly strummed chords rising above the murmuring groups. The people are patchy, not packed, a few friends here or there beneath the soft lights and stars. You sit on the travertine steps to listen and see. A church rises behind you; at the bottom of the steps ahead, water flows through the Bernini fountain. Later, you will think you heard it, though the ambient noise makes this impossible. The fountain belongs in a scene of such quiet and peace, so it must have been, and in your mind, it was.

The scene is more construction than fact, now, twenty years after I last set foot in Rome. Still, the Piazza di Spagna remains one of my favorite places.

It shocked me to learn that not everyone has an internal monologue because my own surges so relentlessly. My brain seeks or churns, swirls or spreads, but it’s only the shape of the movement that changes and not the motion itself. I think.

I lean into this aspect of myself. I seek fresh materials that can alter the texture my mind flows over, or I pursue new channels of thought. I cannot relax by deadening thought; watching bad TV calms my wife, but for me, grinding through something mindless will elicit only a mental scream. I unwind best by following a course someone else has dug and charting it for myself. My wife and daughter don't understand how intellectual challenge can calm me, but it does. I cannot enforce internal quiet. It can only happen, and my mind quiets very, very rarely.

The Piazza di Spagna quieted it. Everything was at once peaceful and alive, unified. And it was beautiful.

When the levee breaks, I put a spell on you. You, proud Mary, down in it… who’ll stop the rain?

Don’t cry. The end is the beginning is the end, Mary Anne with the shaky hand. God’s gonna cut you down.

“When the Levee Breaks,” Led Zeppelin

“I Put a Spell On You,” CCR

“You,” Candlebox

“Proud Mary,” CCR

“Down In It,” Nine Inch Nails

“Who’ll Stop the Rain,” CCR

“Don’t Cry,” Guns n Roses

“The End is the Beginning is the End,” The Smashing Pumpkins

“Mary Anne with the Shaky Hand,” The Who

“God’s Gonna Cut You Down,” Johnny Cash

Natural woodgrain, smoothly shaped into

the form of the thing it will be.

“It’s a good line,” he says of the boat,

running his hand along the raw gunwale before

eyeing it once more from the stern.

The sawdusted floor dwarfs his house, and that’s

room one. He’s reorganizing his tools, and we

walk among their groups to the door and gravel path.

He almost died on his fortieth birthday.

He was not, luckily, in this cabin, where pain would have

rendered the phone bric-a-brac among the books.

His mother had said he needed a doctor, and

his father had helped him off the floor.

“Forty-two is time for a partner,” he says, a

second tumbler of fine scotch in his head.

Another friend has another someone

to meet, he says, strumming a few chords.

But what would he do in Wilmington, he laughs.

He has an open-air bath tub, a reloading table,

a coop with three chickens, DVDs from the library,

a whiteboard wall with three dozen recommendations

of books and poets and conversations and films.

Tomorrow someone will pay him a few grand for

new molding, and three more word-of-mouth jobs await.

For now, he sleeps in his loft next to books from seminary,

dreaming perhaps of a boat that will wend toward

in-season geese, maybe soon.