Journal: April 19: The Southern Tier

I look out the window in upstate New York, see the Mediterranean stretching out below me down the rocky hillside at Faro, three years, two months, fourteen days earlier . 8:25 A. M. Rosemary gone back to sleep, pink & white . I stand at the livingroom window drinking coffee, open the doors to the balcony . Warmth beginning, tho I wrap my hands around the cup, count fishing boats in the sunglare, moving shoreward now slowly, or sitting there motionless on the flat sea . a fat blue arm stretches out from the coast, ripples where wind and currents show muscle below the blue skin of sea stretched out below me . The coffee’s cold toward the end of the cup . I go back to the kitchen for more hot . put orange in bathrobe pocket, reach for knife, return to the balcony with the fresh cup where the flat blue sea fills my eye in the sunglare . stretches out below me. The Southern Tier:    the maple outside the window warms in the early sun . red buds at the ends of branches commence their slow bursting . Green soon Joan moves her legs against mine in the hall, goes down to start my egg . Carlos thumps the lower stairs . We move. All our farewells al- ready prepared inside us   .   aaaall our deaths we carry inside us, double-yolked, the fragile toughness of the shell   .   it makes sustenance possible, makes love    possible as the red buds break against the sunglight possible green, as legs move against legs possible softnesses     .     The soft-boiled egg is ready now  . Now we eat. 19  .  IV  .  71