Good intentions

Daguerreotype is the day,
ancient as I drive.

Beside me she is a ghost,
and I can’t speak to the veil-
the closed idiom of her soul.

Or
I am the ghost
and have simply lost the language
to this often-paved way.

***

They got into the car just the same, even though this was a frivolous trip. Even though she knew his silences sometimes lasted the whole way. Today, though, was a study in differentness. It was his averted eyes, his apparent focus on an imagined point just a few feet away or in the upside-down.

She moves to make small talk but it catches in her throat, knowing that it usually elicits impatience and forced responses, and fearing what it might bring today.
“Why did I make him go? What is wrong?”, she thinks. “I can’t stay quiet. I’m just not that person. No. Not alone, with only my own thoughts.”

They cruise, and he disinfects his hands at alternate stop signs. She pats his knee, leaves her hand there. A hundred, a thousand times this road has known them and been peppered with their tire treads.

“Nick, let’s go home, okay?”…in a voice more coquettish than pleading.

But he drives on, comes to the traffic lights which flash alarmingly as if cautioning against any further advance.

“What’s the way, Beth?”
“Nick, what’s wrong? You know the way.”
“Beth, I can’t. I’m sorry. You need to show me.”

And she cries.

[Image: https://pixabay.com/users/music4life-19559/ ]

For the lost

“FOR THE LOST”

In fog’s night,
there’s a shimmer.
A hint of hearth and home.
A muted invitation
to one who walks alone.

Far away from native shore
and succor of the soul.
Harbouring a longing for
the things that make us whole.

Fishing for remembrances
of paintings in the mind,
but finding only semblances
in images unkind.

And now they come, in elder times,
these showings of a land.
So often gleaned from ancient rhymes
that lead us by the hand.

As if to say this life of yours
is wanting for its bed,
so be untroubled, free of chores,
and rest your weary head.

The day before winter

A walk, shortened,
in October bluster.
Black branches flailing
shake off leaves to the bonfire of fall.
Escape, they do, in a tumble dry dance.
Carpet the catwalks.
Stick to the shoes.

The future’s opaque.
Carrying, carrying things.
Stumbling towards rest.
Knuckles of anxiousness
push up, under the jawline.

Boxes,
unopened these years.
A pair of neglected sneakers,
remembrance of running,
regret now
they didn’t die a natural death.

This material mountain,
trove of trivialities,
hobbling our limp
to tomorrow.

***

image:  https://pixabay.com/users/couleur-1195798/

sunroom

By Meg Sefton…a gentle insight into the way many of us are feeling, I reckon.

Margaret Sefton's avatarWithin A Forest Dark

Sunroom: Sunlight streaming through vertical blinds by Steve Garner, flickr

At exactly 7:44 a.m. the sun rises above the line of covered garages across the lot from my garden apartment. Until today, I had not opened the vertical blinds in my living room at precisely this time. Before the rising of the sun, I was already awake and had learned the wind will blow 30 to 40 miles per hour today, that the temperature was 45 degrees. I sit on my sofa with the sun stabbing my eyes, spotting my vision but I do not close the blinds. I like it I have greeted the sun. And I like the way the 30 to 40 mile per hour wind is blowing the tall pines beyond the garage, dappling the sunlight, causing it to shift and dance.

I am sad a neighbor is moving out. With the rising of the sun…

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