May is a long month

red shoes
cuffed jeans
creamy large sweater
red collared shirt
hair pinned up
grass folded into my sleeve.

You are a cat and I am not a cat.
I cannot tune my ears
I can only look in the direction.

My eyes are not sharp enough in the dark to see the mother fox
or her pup, on the deck, in the shadows,
but I heard her low protective growl.
and it made my fur bristle too.

Wide expanses of loneliness
stretching like the flat fields that stretch between Bakersfield and Tulare

Mother said we should be thankful to be living this life of our own, without a man or children, a life so full of possibility, but she is not here when the loneliness washes in and over.
It is inescapably heavy
unavoidably frightful

But I feel thankful that I have learned to sit still
to let it pass, as it always does.
Thankful that I am not the type to rush to replace the loneliness;
with cell phone calls, with television, with food, with shopping, with alcohol, with relationships, with marriages, with children, with instant messages, with twitter, with work.
People can spend their entire lives rushing away from the loneliness of themselves
and the deep things that stir inside.
let's walk with it for awhile.

Today I felt anger well up,
it rose from my gut,
something mercurial
I held it for a time and inspected it,
and teared up as it cooled.
We all suffer betrayals.