Once again we walk

by the sea, as yet looking --


so expectantly.

When the spring winds fell into my lap
and my stride began to fatigue
and the taste of new days
often soaked in reminiscence
became too difficult to stomach
I tied the skyline around my soul
and made curtains from the sun
to shade the windows from the grey
of afternoon storms
when all the speeding and whirling
thoughts fall into my lap
they intertwine with a breeze
drifting from place to place

Your stem is crooked — your head will fall
without help.  Your neighbour crosses your path
but lends no support.

You must be the only broken thing.

Why?

What hurt you? Did anything hurt you at all? If I could look in the past
Read you like a story
Satisfy the curiosity
— Did you snap
under the weight of a visitor? Or
Is your crown too heavy? Was life too kind; It let you grow fat and happy.
Was life too harsh and you begged for everything on the chance you’d get something at all,
until you had enough, and suddenly found you didn’t know how to stop begging?

There’s no story to read.
I walk away
and don’t think of you

until I’m writing a poem about daisies, and I walk
the same road I’ve walked every day
before — in my mind, in the dark of
my room, with bare feet
wearing a comfortable day dress to bed
because I don’t want to do laundry — and I remember you
I remember spotting you because you were different and
Oh, what a shame: this one is broken
unlike all the others
I had no rush so I stopped and looked
But there was nothing else to see so I kept walking.

This time I do not walk away.
I stop and look
and I think of you,
The broken Shasta Daisy, taller than all the others digging through the pavement
— you will fall further than them all, and you were the only one worth knowing.

All this life sought
Was in my feet forward,
Backing into stumble on rocks
With no path, life is an S curve

It hurts to fall hard
Worse yet
Is to not know why
I walked at all

A cool spring morning
In the rain with my canine on lead
Rushes into the glade
Where a doe may rest unaware

Still at old age I know, nothing
Every morning in the dark
My eyes open, for what?
I have lost all meaning of why

Are the next rising suns
Teachers on the green that
Remain after the snow melts
A reason for standing up?

I lost track of my dog in the meadow
As I listen to a poet who says
That tomatoes do not bleed
Is my life a fruit I can eat

Through the spring branches
I see a home below, pale yellow
A white door and a pane of glass
Asking, will I come forward more

An unknown, will I care to find out
Where is the deer and my dog
The door seductively beckons,
Walk this way with strong shoulders

Every day is an opening
For planting new things
Or letting the past burn to ash
Stunned in body and bones my trips to the ground

The knees and hands ******
And worn, as the apple skin
Holds a hole from the worm
I am the fruit as much as the scar that shines, happening now

I'd walk &/or have
2 parked train cars
ready for your
drunk ***—

Your scant scabby lawn
made such a sight but
you're yet to see my bedroom
so I'm free of judgment
see

all clothes a mess or
clean myself up
I will there, sometime
&
that might be that

&
that is too gooey good
for me.

there it was,
the whole world
at your fingertips
and yet you chose
all the roads of broken glass
and abandoned winds
to plant this pain
in places that ache
for new trees
right here in this home
in this silenced soul
in these tired bones
somehow you chose
to walk with me instead
of running ahead

there it was,
all that I know
about love