The Visitor (3)

This is really my fourth new thing but I wanted to separate my two food entries. I don’t want to be boring right from the beginning. No doubt I will be doing many new food things, knowing my fondness for eating; I'll want to spread them out a bit. And this new thing is outside the rules already. She came to me in my courtyard garden. She isn't an adventure, isn't an out-in-the-world experience I went seeking. The act is art, though, and I'd already allowed art. But the angel took hours and hours, over days. The angel took more effort. These are the kinds of conversations I have in my head. Still, I am convinced my concern for following the rules, for being obedient, is invading even my own project, crimping me in my own creation. So, I am posting willy nilly, out of sequence, disrupting order, working outside the parameters. "They are my own damn rules," I mutter. "I ought to be able to do what I want." I stick out my tongue, make a face, place the little green clock on the patio table. I am doing things I do before my first cup of tea, drifting between my kitchen and my courtyard garden, feeding the birds, fetching the paper, lighting a candle, giving the cats their first morning "snackers." In the midst of my morning meanderings, head still fuzzy from sleep, I have an unexpected visitor. Intoxicating, I think. And I invent a haiku. Now, I may very well have written a haiku or two in grade school, but I don't remember, and it's been decades, after all. So I decided this would be my next new thing, and the rules be damned. It felt like a new thing should feel. So there. So, here.

Jasmine sneaks over my neighbor's wall.
I drink her in. My nose dances.