Still Light

Its always felt like
I had to lance
it open; a vein,
to let the feelings go,
to bleed it out
as though
filled with fever,
unable to diagnose
what ailed me
but rather, now,
with old age
approaching,
wouldn’t it be
much easier
“just to say?”
to no longer allow
my tongue
to be tied,
or speak in circles,
parable, or rhyme,
but to say exactly
what I mean
to describe –
a feeling;
however intense,
however vague,
for all the words
to just float out of me
like a feather
on the wind,
is what I want
more than ever now;
in how the quiet
meandering river bends
with ease.

The trees are burning.
And they’ve been burning
most the year, consumed,
and consuming still,
as we watch from
behind glass screens
and safely removed,
while on the other side
flames lick up the hills
and jump ravines to reduce
the size of cities.
Smoke filling nostrils, lungs,
and eyes, of all animals alike,
including us (them),
who cry now, black tears,
where lack of comprehension
cannot see the true size
such devastation
catastrophe can wreak,
when on a map
appears as though
it could be seized
within the palm of a hand.
And isn’t that how everything
looks? So small, when,
from so very far away we stand.

I’ve gone about learning to love you as I do,
in thought and idea, as though memories,
I’ve made my own and wonder often,
how it will be when I can no longer see you,
and if you will ever find your way back to me,
in the spill of how many words I’ll write in ink,
and what you will say to me then, and how I will miss you.

I know I should say something,
more true, more real, “I know,”
I should dig deeper,
look for the right words
so I could somehow string together
all these feelings inside
I can’t seem to find
the meaning for, as though,
“I could bob for apples,”
face submersed, mouth open,
eyes closed tight, as I try to collect,
and blindly with an overbite,
wondering, how long can I stay here
and hold my breath till I die?

I have started and stopped,
written and erased and thought
to contemplate what it was
or what it is, I have not been
able to say for certain, except
this exception of you keeps
coming back for some sort of
explanation. For the undoing
of me, where my composure
comes unraveling in the presence
of you, I felt something. I start,
I stop, I write, erase, till find
the right word that can tell me.

I’ve forgotten all my words,
they are like a train I watch
pass me, but silently,
as I wonder, who’s on board?
and where are they all going?
I should buy a ticket, I think,
while I wait at the station
and the crows, who so bravely
walk the track watch me
with one eye, head to the side,
and cocked, listening,
as though they might know
my hearts intent more than I.
What is it saying? I ask,
when I cannot tell if I am
home already? or if home,
is still so very far away.

If you but gift me a pear,
ripe and round, and golden baked,
you gift me in dreams and wake,
I want, remembering now,
how looked your face,
at sight of me and took the plate,
and ate, and ate, and ate.

If the sky can open itself up,
turn itself inside out,
give its all, then Winter’s coming,
in this grand scheme of things,
recycling seasons, but not
the same, and every year,
but a beautiful passing,
with those behind us, but
a beautiful memory, for today
is the present gift of the living,
while the future waits in anticipation.

I don’t care to speak of
how tired I am
or think of it as I crawl
between the covers
at the end of day and
curl myself into a c with
arms wrapped tightly
around this idea that you
are there with me
in the darkness where
everything just melts away,
just melts away, until
I have forgotten
all my worries, all my cares,
and with eyes growing heavy,
slip off silently into such
sweet sleep with you.

You can see how a December sky
holds hues of Winter’s coming
as she grows fat, full in her belly,
with thoughts of her lover, who
she wrapped her legs around tight
at the beginning of Summer,
with her mouth still puckering
at the thought of such sweet
then devouring sour, her lips,
she bites, over and over, for Winter,
she won’t be stopped, until the sky,
it grows so heavy with white
that it drops, like a blanket and covers
the earth with all things new and quiet.

He wants me to open my mouth,
muse, but we are all stealing
words from where ever
we can find them, so I swallow hard
instead, that he can take the words
from the movement of my hands
in motion, as though so effortlessly
flawed, he says, but to his ears, music,
as the sentences we construct take air,
where so often I will find them
resting on wires, before they’ll “fly, fly, fly,
quick! to my lover! who waits to hear.”

Fractured,
I watch now
as all
the pieces
slowly
come back
together,
not knowing
yet who
I will be
once they
are finished,
but knowing
who I was
is no longer.