My feet smell the deliciousness of long Thanksgiving. O! plain footsoles
wandering about carpet-jailed stairs like violin strings'
gravity encircling a soul. Hum a-long enough and you can conjure whole
oceans in my eyes, whole masses of water that don't exist
where we were born (hey, landlocked love). Outside in New England it
sometimes snows.
Today it rains.
Anyway, I am a magician. Look here. Can you see
our landlocked love from the shore it does not
have? Like the Pilgrims
finding Indians not from India,
I find me
not from me but from these smiles, our people, these feet,
sinking and stinking of some small peace and walking sockless
up and down a small warm home. And tomorrow,
Harvard again, and someone has snapped my wand
and killed the sparkling airs of incantations I had.
But wait! Isn't this proof of a person who was once
something not transplanted, but rooted earthily into a couch
as brown dancer? I'm waiting for movies
and the seizures of memory there as our minds' own lenses,
and that empty feeling here remembered as good enough reason
to greet us, draw further breaths, comb curls, chew and walk and talk
of the cold outside (waiting endlessly for the landlocked sun), and talk
of the bitter pinpricks of our still-life skin.