Your smug dismissal
of my hoping,
wanting, yearning
keeps me silent.
Neither separation
nor ending
do I seek.
I am trained to
render my voice
into speaking that
nullifies me
into you.
Yet, I remain.
You have ejected me
with burden intact
and untraceable
from its origin.
What is this wanting,
What is this sign?
My daughter and I walked down
to the bridge on main street, laughing
as we slipped along the sidewalk in the
dark, she cuddling her small dog to her
chest, and I leading the way, walking
swiftly, ducking the fingers of low branches
that sought to snag our hair. We stopped
on the corner, before crossing, listening
to the loud report of fireworks. Still, we
could not see their bloom in the sky
before us. Misty rain coated our skin,
hair-raised, goose-pimpled. We laughed.
Should we go on? The rain began to soak
into our clothing. The sign changed to walk;
we raced across the street, turned, and hurried
past the apartment building blocking our view
of the river. We reached the bridge
on
looking down the river towards the park,
we gazed in admiration as the fireworks
continued to pepper the sky with color,
man-made thunder blasting through the rain.
My daughter’s eyes sparkled. So beautiful,
she sighed. Delight stretched the minutes
as we watched in wordless wonder,
together in the rain.
Now…the hardest place to be. It’s so easy to reach behind and caress the former, indulging my mind with what once was and might have been, maybes and if onlys; straining to see the mirage of the path not taken. What was no longer is and no longer holds possibilities.
Today is where I must stand, fully engaged in what is; as it slips into the past I can experience the exquisite joy of balancing between two eternities, letting one slip behind without regret, staying present here without worry for tomorrow. Such a thin, thin tightrope we traverse!
—————————————————-
The lace above my window frames the palest dawn
light seeping from a sky silvered with autumn’s touch;
soft cream accordian blinds capture and magnify morning,
whisper lullabies as I slide back into sleep, savoring the
warmth of thick comfortors, the crisp fall chill present
even indoors, stroking my cheek as I blush back into
dreams.
Tags: eternities, eternity, possibilities, Thoreau, tightropeYes, I’ve been writing every day, but I am not satisfied that what I have written is worth posting. I posted today’s poem on the PAD site, but I’ll put it here too. A response to the painting (title):
: Piazza d’Italia, by Giorgio de Chirico
His ears would have tilted back if not frozen in stone.
The late afternoon sun, slightly chill, barely warmed
his granite back. The men met politely,
avoiding the topic most on their minds.
So surreal, the green glow baking the earth.
No longer the color of life, but the reminder
of transcendent death, gripping the world in its teeth,
claws unsheathed to hold tightly. Slender hope.
Sliver of sanity out of view, while the world tilts
on its axis towards the dying star careening
towards our sun, a tail of comets twenty earths wide.
And they talk, “How is your wife?” and
“Do you think the market will go up?”
Screams of fear held at bay
by the platitudes of everyday.
Rain coats busy streets;
green prongs of crocus emerge
while drivers swish by.
My first kite
I cannot remember the color or the size,
but I remember how the wind
tugs on the string, pulling and teasing my fingers,
whispering that I should “let go” but I resist and I run,
slanting across the field to avoid any wires,
away from the trees that would steal my kite.
Running, my hair tangles my vision;
so I stumble across the uneven ground
in my haste to keep moving. The wind flips my
bangs behind me and I can see the trees racing closer.
I slow and begin to wind in the long, long twine
tying my heart to the sky.
The light grows as the sun lingers longer each day. Here in Michigan, I can only hope for an approximation of what we experienced when our family, en masse, visited my father’s birthplace. Oh, I long for the close-to-the-equator July days of Bornholm! Returning to Danmark in my mind, I recall the sun rising at 3 a.m. and setting sometime around 11 p.m. Somehow, we strayed into the evening, languorous but not tired, refreshed by the almost solid presence of light. Glorious, velvety ocean of light through which we swam each day.
Luminous rays reflect
Light lingers on the Baltic
Climbing the rocks
The shoreline captures the light
Shining from our children’s eyes
I miss the sound of the tree frog;
the endless chirping that speaks of eternity.
In the city, work consists of
interruptionschainedtogetherbyfifteenminutebreaksandhalfhourlunches.
Where the tree frog lives,
time stands still.
The sound chains today with yesterday
and the early summers of tomorrow.
Tags: Poems