To Orient

It is not the first time that I have watched a man pack his ruck.  Usually, he is the one leaving home but now it is my turn, and a good man at that.  I stopped keeping track of where my mind is and often it leads me to brick walls where I end my childish waffling, wining, baying, Chesapeake forever tugging my hair when he hits it from behind, and a firm palm, open, worn.  War sighs from inside his eyes as he neatly folds a civilian wardrobe, sleeves of his hoodie doubled over to fit the square indentations of small pox inoculations, dozens within one atom in my fingernail.  We teach animals in the bathtub how to sing about marriage, how to buy groceries and find the best price.  Domesticate me, wife and mother me, belittle me in my great-grandmother's knitted afghan, burgundy stripes and grays.  The sky in Maryland is heavy but weight has nothing to do with it.  My constant questioning of myself is coming to a halt the moment I realize I am.  The complex relationships between men, and the women who walk behind them on the sidewalk when someone is coming in the opposite direction, who hold their emotion for fear of their own explosion, surging Atlantic dirt, and the red sea-grasses.  The last time we passed each other only briefly, never said goodbye or come over, another why, uttered motionless across the roving floor.  The bank moves despite the tide and for itself and nothing else.  I struggle to put words to the momentum of my brain, fluid build-up rain splattering down the concrete puddle, the dark muddled perception on the precipice of clarity stares me into buckets.  This fuck-it mentality gets me no where but too obvious rhymes, and the following words all suffer.  Summer's countenance fawns over my yellow, wanders, bellows from Baltimore's belly below the Harbor fish sink, slick self-service gas station attendants eye me through the glass.  With all these mouths around me I presume too much attention, should find myself a rabbit skin to hide my hands--call us livestock, milk and meat--holes, where armor used to be, locking hair, and tongue to pallet, wooden crab mallet banging claws apart, rip the lungs out with my fingers, the fat mustard curdled inside noble crustaceans, their cobweb resistance to change, is a good thing, if you want to be dualistic about it.  A walking meditation is sometimes with my hands, my feet crossed dormant on the hearth of a white oak, speckled toads burping in time to scratchless pen needles.  What I lack is true direction, my mind passively stated to let the world happen, as if it all matters.  I cannot always have circular thoughts, and I leave room for more prescriptions to deal with reality, the sombre morality of men who carry guns, and the women who cradle their boot wings.