Sympathetic joy

Sympathetic joy

I’ve been collecting words from a book to give legs
to thoughts nesting in pages. She’s harvesting rainwater
to make bread. Without training the mind first, joy
too will be in danger of turning sour to jealousy. Lately
it’s not birds that interrupt sleep, it’s the way I’ve organized
myself to fear what has not yet taken place. The book is full
of stories about other kinds of thoughts, a DIY manual
for joy. Once a mother and her daughter were carried
by the river. The mother didn’t think it was important
that she was tossed like a question in the river as long
as her daughter was safe. The daughter had the same thought.
Both drowned. Stories from the book rarely turn to the present
for reward, it’s the long durée that we’re pushed to seek.
The point being their thoughts for each other lifted them
to celestial rebirths. I’m known to paint walls without covering
the floor or taping the trims: regret, reproach, repeat.
I rarely remember which is why rebirth is not a tempting
stimulus for action. Someone I know is helping her father
find his home. She thinks his parents came from the village
a day’s horseback from my mother’s nomadic home.
We rarely complete the sentence. The “journey in 1959”
gives the plot away. Some days she’s full of hopelessness
but she finds comfort among people who can speak of the past.
I know what she wants. I too look for hope in my shoes.
Wish for them to take me home. Rainwater, I tell her.
Others have been there, where we are now. I wish
for her bread to rise. I’m wearing good thoughts as protection.
Wait, stay a while with me. It’s raining, and if we wait
we may see a rainbow. Some days that’s enough.