It sits at the foot of the leather chair in your living room.
A car, carved from a single piece of wood
when your father was just a boy.
Nothing recognizable, simply a design
in the mind of a child too sensitive for his time and place.

There is a ribbon taped to the bottom with old cellophane tape.
Third place. A national award from General Motors,
a contest created to awaken young designers,
and set them on a path of creativity and industrial design.
It took. You have the drawings your father made,
all swooping fenders and steel lines.

They beat much of his heart out of him in that time and place.
They made him tough and hard, his brokenness disguised
as strength and rough corners. He tended his wounds
with alcohol and anger.

But his desire to create never left him. Sober, he was brilliant,
an innate understanding of things and possibilities
punctuated his life and through him, mine.
He died just a few short years ago.

We have choices of what to remember. What to keep.
I choose things like this car that sits unobtrusively
at the foot of the leather chair. I choose made things
and they surround me like an aura, even
when they go unnoticed by those who merely come and go.

Words matter.
Your mother taught you this
when you were a boy.

She lived it, taught it. It sank in,
a vital part of who and what
you would become.

Words create feelings.
They heal. They wound.
They inspire, inform, sell,

They should be
things of truth.

You think on this on the long drive home.
The GPS has changed its mind once again
and you are on a new road with new thoughts.

It is dark, late at night. Here and there,
lights twinkle. Cabins and houses in the forests.
You can smell the wood smoke.

Yes, it is February. And there is snow
and ice on the road.
You drive, as you generally do, too fast.

But it is warm outside. Over 40.
and the ice melts. You feel it give way
as you press the accelerator around the curve.

It is nearly spring. Oh yes, there will be more snow,
but you are aware of the change.
There is something new in the wind.

You sense, more than see, the bulbs stir.
It is time to change colors,
to let go of the greys and ***** whites

that are so familiar, but not quite true any longer.
You need a new vocabulary, a thing of color and sun,
the truth of you.

You have become too familiar with dark words.
They filled so much of your past
that they had become your mother tongue.

But you do not live there any longer.
To speak the truth, you must learn new words
to tell it.

You have always been bad at languages.
Words came hard. They still do.
You barely passed French in high school, college, grad school.

It is your nemesis.

But when you live in a place, you must learn
the new land’s words. To speak them
as if they were your own.

And so you struggle with this vocabulary of joy,
to tell your truth in words that feel odd
spilling out of your mouth and pen.

You must let go
your mother tongue.
The truth insists on it.

There are new paintings to create,
bright things, the colors of childhood,
a reclaiming of innocence,

and it awaits you at the end of the road,
in the place where your love lives.
You press the pedal.

The car moves faster through the night.

Light. Space.
Line. Interruptions.
Triggers and memory.
A gallery with art on one wall,
a mix of truth and pain.
compelling whispers shout.
A place to learn what you say,
what you create,
matters less
than what is seen and heard.
Light. Space.
Line. Interruptions.
Triggers and memory.

You shift in the bed. Light comes through the windows.
There are birds singing outside,
too early for spring, but singing nonetheless.

A full night’s sleep and you are still tired.
Your bones and soul both resist inertia.
The warmth, yours and hers, comingle.

Nearly three years since you exchanged vows.
None of them easy. None of them the stuff of fairy tales.
Times of death and loss and struggle,

Constant chaos.

You prefer peace. That is the truth of it.
it has been a long journey to capture it.
an old man’s journey to rebuild himself from the rubble.

She shifts slightly and settles back into her deep sleep.
You would prefer the fairy tale, but you have lived too long
to believe in them.

In its place is what you have, a different kind of love,
soft as flesh, strong as steel, A thing you wish
you had found as a young man.

But age has its value. Age is a treasure,
Wisdom, however it comes, is treasure. You smile, fully awake,
reaching your arm over the covers

and drawing her closer still.

The ball rolls, bounces and spins.
The crowd holds its breath,
anticipating, against the odds,
their magic number.

It stops. Money, in small plastic chits,
designed to lessen the loss,
changes hands.
And it begins again.

The wild card. The odd number,
the stacked odds when you play with fate,
all for the thrill, your mind lost
to passion and hope and the excitement

of beating the odds.

I do not gamble. I have lost enough
to set myself up for loss yet again.
There is no thrill in the game.
I have been drained of hope and pretense

that the fates favor me.
Better to run under their radar,
to deprive them of the chance to crush my hopes
and leave me broken.

I have become a student of the old ways.
Simple. True. Faithful.
I need less now than then, and with that less,
I have more to lose.

Leave others to play. They believe
in their place in the pantheon of gods and fates.
You watch, wondering how long they can lose
and still believe.

No one in town can tell you
exactly when they closed the plant,
but it was a generation ago.

Young generations, with children of their own
cannot recall it anything but what it is today:
an empty ghost of a building,

a place their parents speak of,
once bustling, now habited
by the occasional homeless soul

until they too, are chased away.
The canal runs past,
shallow water running fast

for no purpose.
An indelible, empty landmark.
It draws you, a grim reminder

of your own empty past,
of dark windows and broken things
and memories of purpose lost.

You go in.
It is dark and dusty inside. Cobwebs abound.
Most everything salvageable has been pillaged

or spray-painted with graffiti,
messages from the lost boys who never knew
this place as it was.

There is a strange art to it.
Half history, half a storage hall
for ancient dreams and promises.

You linger in wonderment,
that such enterprise could be made worthless
by the scratch of an accountant’s pen,

and just like that, becomes a mausoleum.
A holder of dead hopes.
It is at times, too close to the bone. Except

for this one thing:
Yours is a tale of resurrection,
and when you are done with your explorations.

you will walk again
in the sun.
Hopes intact and shining.

It is a room of chairs.
Their thin spindles let the light through,
visually almost invisible,
easy to move about the room,
to reconfigure as people come and go,
with no sense of mass or weight,
always room for one more, one less,
a different sort of life,
one that allows for constant change,
ebb and flow,
never too much,
never too little,
a shape-shifting goldilocks kind of room.

You feel strangely at home here,
an older version of Alice in Wonderland,
never quite yourself,
never quite what others expect,
never quite fitting in,
at least not in the way you expected.
The world has not made room for you.
You are tolerated
as long as you re-arrange your furniture
in the proper way
in the proper time.

Your eyes soak in the room,
so airy and bright,
and settle into a chair.
There is no one here but you
and the woman you love,
and it matters not where the chairs are
as long as there are two together.