Small Birds Sing the Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock

I wish the rest of my life were one long rainy fall day, upstate, some place where the leaves are turning and the apples are ripe, someplace where there is pumpkin soup brewing and a chilling breeze wafting the smell of children playing in hay with candy-apple breath.

I wish I were standing in the kichen of my first studio apartment eating herkimer cheese and cooking a huge bowl of black bean soup in a fuzzy sweater with a world of knowledge opening before me like a barn door. That is where I first read Chaucer and now when the spring comes and the birds begin to sing I can only think:

Here bygynneth the Book of the Tales of Caunterbury.

Sometimes I feel as though I have been sleep walking for some 600 years. Then nature pricks me in my heart. I have measured out my life in rain drops, in clouds passing, in blades of grass.

I have been waiting for the chance to relive some day once existed so that I could share it with someone else. I have been dreaming of a day when I could read A Few Lines Composed Above Tinturn Abby and not feel a horrible sense of loss of kinship. Some fine morning as it were. When I would wake up and live forever in the lamb light. King again of the apple orchard.

Today, today I am going out to clean the pasture spring. You come too.