The Dog Stars

by Peter Heller

Almost never home, any of us.

There is no one to tell this to and yet it seems very important to get this right. The reality and what it is like to escape it. That even now it is sometimes too beautiful to bear.

So I wonder what it is this need to tell. To animate somehow the deathly stillness of the profoundest beauty. Breathe life in the telling.

It caught me sometimes: that this was okay. Just this. That simple beauty was still bearable barely, and that if I lived moment to moment, garden to stove to the simple act of flying, I could have peace.

Is it possible to love so desperately that life is unbearable? I don’t mean unrequited, I mean being in the love. In the midst of it and desperate. Because knowing it will end, because everything does. End.

And smell is always the smell itself and memory, too,

To multiply the years and divide by the desire to live is a kind of false accounting.

If there is nothing else there is this: to be inundated, consumed.

There is a pain you can’t think your way out of. You can’t talk it away. If there were someone to talk to. You can walk. One foot the other foot. Breathe in breathe out.

And. You can’t metabolize the loss. It is in the cells of your face, your chest, behind the eyes, in the twists of your gut. Muscle sinew bone. It is all of you.

Grief is an element. It has its own cycle like the carbon cycle, the nitrogen. It never diminishes not ever. It passes in and out of everything.

We. I. It is possible to continue together. Say what you like it felt that way to me. Walking behind, ranging to the side, the same but not apparent. Not as. A lake like a gem set in a bezel of tufted tundra and rough scree, the water green with the luminous unapologetic green of a semiprecious stone but textured with the wind. Then it wasn’t. The

wondering whether it was a good thing or a bad thing to wish for things that aren’t there.

How we gentle our losses into paler ghosts.

I want to be two people at once. One runs away.

yes

When her mouth found mine I disassembled. Not exploded like a bomb or anything, but came apart. A few pieces at a time. They floated away, went into a kind of orbit. A splintering galaxy. An extravagant slow motion annihilation.

Watch anyone enter their arena of real mastery and you see it, the growing bigger than themselves.