Almost There

I wish we could have spent some time together -
we could have comforted one another
in our emptiness and parted, understanding
that time is the thief that steals our happiness.


I should have stayed
and attended to the cypress trees
swaying in the Autumn gusts -
the mallard’s winged flap,
the otter’s voluptuous submergence;
listened to the birds’ entreaty -
stay mired in what I was,
instead of returning to get tangled in the
dangling skeins now being braided
into a hangman’s noose.

A house of junk
crowding in the corners,
creeping across the floor,
wrapped in dated stories;
treasures hiding in corrugated boxes,
stacked in the backs of closets -
I forget they even exist.

A sense of something missing,
gathering silica and mold spores -
mustiness of old despairs;
stuff and facepaints and hairpins
rattling inside shoeboxes,
make me wonder what need
placed them there.

Garbage bags full of trash,
twist-tied and thrown to the curb;
how easy it was to let it go -
first a closet
then a room
then a house
until the echoes rendered up the hollowness;
releasing the symbols of security
and imprisonment:
the cobbles of my life.

Everything I have is slipping away.
Even as I wrap my fingers
around materiality,
my knuckles will not tighten
and things clatter to the floor.
Attachment to the world fades
and I wonder what
could bring me pleasure
at this stage.

Breaking up the concrete
hardened around my ankles;
skull cracking against the ceiling,
shattering the boundaries
I mapped out for myself -
divestitures of space and time,
moored to no thing
and no where -
a nomad of the mind.

The brocade of being;
the tips of tree skeletons
scratching bony fingers
against window panes.
I collect my spiritual trinkets -
ching-changing
in the existential register.

Sack-cloth rants in a burned out garden,
ice crystals adhering to the ashes.
I am wrapped in chicken wire,
fingers torn at the edges and
my grandmothers’ hands are looming.

The pines waver and leaves bustle
but the birds are quiet;
a beagle plots his course
through backdoor repasts -
the winterberry sheen and
the gleam of pebbles roadside,
surrounded by intent -
things with nothing better
to do than be the wind’s toy
in a fraud’s game.

Angles shifting -
north to northeast,
south to southwest,
and still the compass swings,
unable to find its point of rest.

No more clinging like bark,
I shall fall away in shards
and become a plume of grass
scattered by exhaled breezes,
energy pulses, and hushed rumors -
as I pass as fine as hair
on the throat of a child.


© 2000 Melissa Songer