It feels wrong to stay at the lake for five days and not five thousand,
during which the water and the landscape and people it shapes could claim me for their own
and I’d grow used to it all, maybe.
The flitting swallows and wood fire at twilight puzzle me, like an embrace that makes you feel guilty for leaving (or ever coming at all).
I leave while the embers still glow under low, wind-tossed flames that leave the scent of smoke in my hair.
I found a beetle in the boat, laying flat on his back, wiggling his meaty, spindly legs in the air, trying to grasp something – anything – to right his shiny, swollen body.
Slowly, he stopped straining and scrambling on the carpeted floor of the docked pontoon and just lay there, little feet in the air.
He reminded me of myself when I try Pilates.
Pathetic,
I thought, sympathetically.
Some might cleave their dreams from waking hours
And whims from decisions – but I
Can’t sever a knot with the edge of reason or
Rend the weft of life from the warp of wonder.
And so, my hands are patient and deft –
If I’m given the task of untangling, I’ll take it.
If you’ve seen me, you’ve seen it:
What pushes my eyebrows together;
What clutches at my heart and mind.
If you’ve heard me, you’ve heard it:
What looks like silence or empty sound, but is words turned inward,
And I unknowingly wish ill for myself.
I know God, and I’d never think to extinguish this –
Yet, I forget vigilance, and the dark swallows my light, since it cannot have me.
If you’ve known me, you’ve known it,
And if you’ve felt me, you’ve felt it,
And now, I see it, hear it, know it, and feel it –
Please, remind me of goodness and of pastimes
In a form that I can revel in –
That I’ll preserve with present
And future joy.
This time of year, the ivy on red brick walls glows Kelly green,
The same shade of the summer tops aunts wear to church under cardigans.
I could never pull off a green like that, but the ivy wears it well.
I am beginning to feel the pangs of being
Some painting one is ashamed of
and keeps facing the wall
In a basement storage room,
The stench of mildew intensifying
With every day that I sit here.
Y’know, I don’t mind so much.
After all, it is terribly amusing, I must say
To be meant for display,
Yet to function as an absorber of musty air
And only be viewed
By a visitor or two.
Is this how it was meant to be?
Perhaps, admiration in sunlit rooms
Never even was; maybe this, this darkness,
Is the only beauty to be had
In a world of unbearability.
Is death really anything
Besides a change in location
And a progression of purpose?
In that case, maybe the both of us
Are always dying, so long as we live.
Blood flows over me, filling and spilling over the pits and lumps in my face.
Appeased, I relish the offering – life gives itself to me, and I drink thirstily;
This is beauty to me – I cannot have enough of it –
Red and coagulating, it clings to and covers the ugliness of myself.
I have never wept for any creature that is sacrificed on me –
Perhaps because each one feared me and my unending lust for the price of innocence.
Yet, you came untrembling, gentle, and lay your life over me.
I could not move in that moment, and was as a stone – fear me, fear me!
I am afraid; fear me!
Water runs down my face – it is your tears, and mine – why do I cry?
No sooner than when that life washed over me was I no longer a ball of blackened blood –
My visage has returned to one grey and undulating, like any of earth’s stones, and I am purified.
I don’t sit in a temple filled with cloying blackness or the smell of perfumed death –
Instead, I am in a forest, and it is morning;
Dew kisses my face, the birds are singing, and light shines through the new leaves.
I am soft for the moss that grows on me, and a bird plays in the places where water pools –
Life has grown on me, and I do not need more.
Fascinating, to learn what one intersection creates, when two lines happen to meet –
Opposite angles find themselves ironically congruent, whether reflected or rotated,
And, as I have been taught, adjacents are complimentary – just one degree more, and we’d agree it’d be too much;
At that point, they’d be getting far too obtuse for their own good.
But, if lines align just right,
It all equates, divvied up so fairly – how convenient it must be!
Being perpendicular comes with those perks.
In the meantime, those parallels apparently have nothing in common (besides the plane that they share), no point of concurrence or unique angles formed by them,
No rays radiating from the center –
Only arrows to infinity in the same two directions, never skewed, never bent, no new leanings of any sort –
At least that we can observe.
By the second, my own self sinks deeper below my feet,
Lodging itself firmly into the asphyxiated earth under layers of asphalt and iron.
Like them, I wish to exist without apology –
I was only put here, after all.
