ISLAND CABIN

I like not paying any attention to myself from time to time.
If you do it long enough you can catch a glimpse of yourself
caught unawares, like watching yourself in profile.
Do you do that?
Is perceiving yourself even a valuable goal?
Maybe not, but it's compelling.
I was remembering the nuns saying Jesus is always with you
I would turn around fast to see if he was behind me
waiting for the drinking fountain, coming into the bathroom,
displaced by the doorknob and hovering near it, but why.
We're just back from farmsitting for our friend, me and my family.
I keep not taking pictures.
It's a year this month that my camera walked off from the Brooklyn apartment.
It might be time to stop making lemonade and get a new one.
I do like what you can't capture.
Crossing the field towards the house
crunching half frozen ground past a slowly creaking windmill
like reenacting a hat movie
and realizing you were happy two seconds ago
before the word happy drifted in and changed the feeling.
Of the chickens we liked the bantum.
Of the stars we liked the meteors and planes.
On the road in the really dark we were scared of the yapping coyotes
and I forgot to not break into a trot, for appearances.
We arrived at the wrong house
and walked back blanketed with meteors and blinking airplanes,
4000 of them in the sky at any given time
the coyotes and us on the ground beneath them.