Flowers of what is pollinated
by bees of what might have
been. Mundane afternoons married
to evenings of TV and ringtones
that have forgotten how to ring.
An old journal reminds her
it’s not too late
to resurrect a dream or lost
shimmer, to right her caddy-corner
heart left askew by
a lover’s hands. She grasps
for the notes under air,
leaving the past to glide
past and out the door.
She bows to the cartography of light
and presses the guidebook to
her chest. Knowing it’s time
to rise and go, to spiral out
into the unmoored and unknown.
“This is our life
These are our friends
This is our family that grows and bends.
This is our chance
This is our time
This is us making things to somehow leave behind
What will we leave behind to show
That this is our life”
The clouds drank in ravens
making the pines lucid.
His shadow fell beneath
the sky. If she listened
closely, she could hear
his melodic cadence
delivering soliloquies
adrift on the wind.
He as he was
She as she became
wake. Aware.
Taking color and form.
Both somewhere between
what was there.
What’s not there. (What
was never there)
Someone you think you
remember and can’t
quite forget.
Lost mail belonging on someone
else’s kitchen table.
The parenthesis enclosed.
No comma, no pauses.
Time takes away. Gone
in an instant particles
of the past.
She stays.
(She can’t stay)
Tired from this slow
burning off of yesterday.
That which was lost (never was)
will not become again.
She always thinks she
see gleams of him,
The one she thought
she knew,
glimpsed and then gone.
The heart can only be
deceived for so long.
The stem decimated,
drowning in crushed rose petals.
No longer powerless
to the storm.
Wind that never really
blew for her.
Easier now to withstand
His presence merely less,
but no longer wholly more.
His shadow falling,
falling into dust.
The only sound she
hears in this moment is her
voice turning into
an early frost.
To every poem there is
a time and season.
Seasons that coagulate
into lost years,
time wasted.
In this one, she scourges
the past with lyrical ease
The breeze no longer
contradicting itself.
Her pen drops ink
of ice, no longer
pointing to the sky.
The view always distorted
anyway. The final chapter
written. She no longer
cares about heart revisions.
Every time love has visited me it has been accompanied by a death spirit. Leaving behind the chill of isolation. Yet, I know I have been blessed to love, to have loved. After heartache, after lesson learned in tears, the chest becomes less tight, the soreness fades.
I long to look at love in a new way, while standing in its light, to be caught in its sight, to gaze up and see Orion shining. to be joined in a long continuance. The hard candies of granite and bone. I long to live alongside love in the fervor of hope, in the heard, seen, and finally fathomable power of a soul held in place.
I want to feel the brush of love’s tenderness, to remember the constellations I once dreamed upon. I long for a vocabulary built on the promise of truth, in a world where I know the language like I know home, residing on a strong foundation that can prevail in the sweetness of the summer harvest and in the noon frost of winter.
Give me a love I can dwell in. I’ve had it with uninhabitable beauty. I desire a place that suits me, a place to rest where I can finally tear the footbridge down
Everything I Never Told You 