Outside it is snowing, just a bit.
Twelve years in and it still seems odd
Vermont, cold and with its ethereal light
feels more like home than the hills and mountains
you spent your first 54 years immersed in.

It seems odd that you were nearly sixty
before rediscovering the ocean,
Maine and Cape Cod, wild, often rugged,
nothing like the sprawling sands
where you were raised. And yet, it is these seas,
not the seas of your first half century
that calm your soul and raise it
from it’s gloom.

It seems odd that the place
that sings its siren song,
calls to you, makes you yearn like a lovesick boy,
lies in a foreign land,
with a foreign language,
nothing familiar, nothing, and yet
the first time you arrived,
sitting in Saint Mark’s square,
cappuccino in hand,
the Adriatic light and salt water filling your senses
you felt more at home
than you have ever felt in your long fractured life.

It seems odd, that you are so in love
with a woman so different than the southern sirens
that surrounded you most of your life.
Darker. More direct. Challenging, yet gentle,
Struggling strong, real.
She enflames you. She calms you.
She protects you. Even from yourself.
You have never known a woman like her.
And yet, in her arms, you feel that most unusual of things,
safe.

It seems odd that at this age, you look at the places
you called home, and the places you feel home,
that make your soul feel whole, complete, possible,
and you question so much of the place and time
and people who raised you.
But only for a few moments
before realizing home has never changed.
Truth has never changed.
You have.

Maybe Remembered

Some call it art. Some do not.
Prattle perhaps. Scribble.
It shows up in the night.
It is read by strangers and friends.
Passers by.
Bits of it resound. Maybe remembered.

It fades with the weather.
That is the nature of it.
Circumstances that resonated a week, a season,
moments that made it all resonate
before it fades.

In time, someone will paint over it.
Maybe you. New words. New poems.

Every day you do it. Every day.
Grateful anyone reads. Always surprised.
Still. Still surprised.

There was a time you wanted to be famous.
Not that poets and artists from obscure places
end up on the Tonight Show. You never were
the most realistic crayon out there.
But you had dreams, some of them borrowed.

The odd thing is how many you made happen.
not yours. Yours got lost. Your grafitti painted over
with billboards and a need to be loved.

You broke of course.
It’s what happens when the best of you
is painted over.

And that brokeness was the best thing,
the darkness made you real.
Made you, you. That child you remembered,
gleefully painting mindless color,
capturing what was lost.
Capturing what was found
picking up the scattered words
and re-arranging, a happy puzzle,
and angry puzzle. Everything immediate
or poor history. Feelings. Nothing more.

Graffiti.
You make it.
And walk to the next wall.
Never famous.
And happier for it.
The moment is enough.

You sip your coffee.
You take a bite of the sausage gravy, thick and salty.

The music playing in the diner is strange.
If music could be danish modern, this would be it,
streamlines and bleached, oddly pure,
in a language you cannot understand and yet somehow, do.

In a flash you are young and old,
moments of the journey like a roller coaster,
a madman’s collage with tunes.

And the words. Like a bad flashback scene, they come,
a B movie, or worse, lurid and darkly humorous,
other people’s words, each one a memory and a trigger,
leading to another and yet another.

Were I not so vibrant, it would be an end of life montage,
and you sit sipping, taking it all in, aware that no matter what happens
from here on out, you have survived the wreckages,
landing like a cat thrown out the window
so often you almost laugh when you fly,
knowing somehow, your feet are awaiting you below.

The Squeaking of Hinges

It is cloudy with a spit of unexpected rain
as you make your way to the barn,
unhooking the latch pulling the door. Open.

It creaks. The hinges are old and iron,
They rust without care, and need to be used
to stay limber. You have been gone a time

and they are stiff with neglect.
Still, they open. And as the week of your presence
falls back into the routine of letting animals in and out,

the hinges will fall back into their comfortable habits.
They will grow quiet as you oil them and use them,
until you no longer notice them in the morning

and nothing is left but you
and the wildstock.

Empty and Armed.

Early in the morning and you walk in the sand.
Near the shore it undulates, God’s art,
renewed each morning at the whim of weather and tides.

You walk in the sand. Your foot prints leave divots.
Water seeps in. Tiny ***** scurry, almost invisible.
If you look carefully, you can see their tracks
before they disappear into their tiny burrows.

You walk. The waves whisper. It is a quiet morning.
No one else is on the beach.
Just you, your God and your demons.

The demons disperse like dandelion seeds,
unable to hold on in the vast emptiness.
They become as lost as you once were.
lost in the horizon, their claws rendered useless

as you ignore them.

You become lost too. Lost in the wash of the waves.
In the long stretches of sand, in the place you walk
beyond foodprints.

It is worth the walk. Worth the ache in your aging legs.
to empty yourself. To find yourself.
To find what is left when you let everything else go
and join the demons on the wind.

It is worth the walk.
And too, worth the walk back.
For that is part of it.
You cannot live here forever.
You were not made to be a monk in the desert,
only a pilgrim.
There is a world that needs your meger talents,
and you come back to it
both empty
and armed.

Sometimes
the biggest step forward
is a step back,

to find the place
you left the path,
following someone else’s journey
instead of your own.

Dust on the Clocks

Three clocks stand on the mantle.
Four generations of time keepers
stand still.

The mantle clock with it’s graceful wooden arch
reminiscent of cathedrals, complete
with hand painted dial and brass pendulum
belonged to your great grandparents,
one of two things in your home
that came from the plantation they once owned
before the civil war swept through
and began their long, slow decline.
It chimed the hour when you were growing up,
it’s strand spring driven mechanism
sonorous when it rang, and yet somehow
almost tinny.

There is another, from your grandfather’s house.
Faux marble, a bit too bright and gaudy for it’s time,
a tiny arched gravestone, you wind it
and the clock ticks annoyingly, steadily,
never quite keeping perfect time.
According to your grandfather, it never did,
It came from a world’s fair, he once told you,
one of only a couple trips he made
that took him far from his little farm villiage,
His wanderlust never quite fit in there,
and though rarely fed, it was a memory worth having
despite the clock’s being terrible at its job.

The last clock is small. A tilted block. More recent.
A gift you brought back to your parents
from your first trip overseas. A thank you
for feeding your own wanderlust early,
of making you a traveler and wanderer,
willing to be uncomfortable in another’s world for a time
in exchange for the growth each journey brings.
It sat on the desk in their den
until the day the last of them died,
before coming back to you, this small reminder
silent with its electric motor. Almost invisible
except for the mark it left on your soul.

The clocks have dust on them.
You are not the best housekeeper
and time means less to you now than it once did.
Painfully you have learned the lesson
of deadlines and plans destroyed again and again.
There is only now. Here. This moment.
The rest is illusion. A beautiful construction,
artful as the clocks. Full of memories.
Full of promise. And nothing more.