playback

I know when that note sounds
and I feel touched everywhere
that anything could happen… 
anything bad

it is the obviously-wrapped gift
unbothered, not hiding its shape 
--a rock, a key, a boomerang
you already know

so I am this stranger crying until
it makes me stranger--becomes
my first experience of myself 
as just a memory

__________

A note apropos of nothing: It made me so sad to hear that James Van Der Beek who played Dawson in Dawson's Creek (a comfort watch back in the day that I started dipping back into during the pandemic) died yesterday (so young!) from colorectal cancer. I'm horrified to learn that two years of cancer treatment have left this successful celebrity actor's family needing a GoFundMe to pay for their children's education. The US healthcare system is brutal. [Also brutal, the look Big A gave me when I said Dawson had "battled cancer" because every obituary I had just read used that phrasing. I should do better.]

________________

Pic: The frozen Maple River. The temperatures look like they're going up--gloriously--so all this is going to be melt and runnels soon.