The Everything in the Everyday
I thought he’d surely break her heart
When push came down to shove:
And I’d have reasoned with her, but
She was a girl in love
So for the beautiful mistake
She lived with all her fire;
Though very much of her got burned
By him, a shameless liar
He was no good for her, but she
Won’t think what might have been:
For she’s a woman now who’s learned
How to
Get up
Again
He stands with a tray of Chick-fil-A
Out in the mall food court;
A man who’s in his seventies
The quiet, smiling sort
And he gets tired on his feet –
For he stands most the day;
So people ask him why he doesn’t
Just go home, and stay
They do not know his heart when
They suggest that he move on:
The grief he finds at home
These lonely years
Since she’s
Been gone
So many varied throbbing thoughts
She writes upon the sunlit wall;
Secluded things that she has seen,
Supplied scant time to tell them all –
Surrounded by her bits of grace,
Supporting her long skein of quest:
Simplicity at surface, and
Sinuousness in all the rest
a morning comes, in love and mist, alive —
the habitat of all its absentees —
she’ll rise to breathe again and fail to thrive
as long ago were any days of ease
but soft upon the door, the winter knocks,
and hard upon the floor, her husbands sleeps:
her best pajamas, and her favorite socks
make up the company she daily keeps
and coffee greets her as a warming friend,
the flickering screen of comments on her posts –
the hope perhaps today the joints will bend
and she won’t know, again, depression’s ghosts
as coffee to her lips is lightly kissed
the day begins again, in love and mist
I wander freely in and out of dreams
Along a path where long ago we walked;
By tires on long ropes, swung over streams,
Where crickets chirped and frogs croaked as we talked –
And as young lovers do, we also did.
I loved the shy excitement of your eyes;
Your quick’ning breath, as on that path we hid
And tried our civil hearts to naturalize –
I still recall your look, your smell, your taste;
Each element of your glowing embrace –
To sin not, nor repent, in any haste,
To watch a moonlight shadow on your face –
With you I wander there in ecstasy:
With you, who’s never spent one dream on me
The night will always open up its arms
To one like you, ye favored of the earth;
And shield you from the worst of worldly harms,
The way it has since your advantaged birth
Your travels done with such unthinking ease,
Tonight you are in Egypt for a spell;
While others scratch at dust upon their knees,
You’ve gifts unopened too profuse to tell
But why? It isn’t beauty or acclaim,
Although you’ve some of both, but just a share;
Your are not devious or full of shame,
You’re merely you, and mostly, you’re just there –
Perhaps, you’re not what I should contemplate,
But why I look at you, and curse my fate
Entering for the first time, we saw a room, big and new, that smelled of newness and spare furniture; its most conspicuous feature was a series of brightly colored tiles covering most of the back wall. These followed no pattern my eyes could make out, but I was fascinated by them: it was as though, even then, my heart knew that art itself resides in the stories we imagine as much or more as any story explicitly told.
