It has been so long. So fast.
Images blur the windows in the early morning.
A glimpse, a flicker to grab your interest
and then it is gone. Towns. Factories.
Stairs to….. you know not where.
It is already gone. The whole ride a tease.

You were made for slower travel,
to see things in depth,
never trusting the flicker of them,
with the ability to stop and see the details,
the grain of the wood and the nails and pegs
that hold things together, or the rot
teetering on the edge of coming undone.

You wonder how much you missed in faster times,
what you lost in the journey, in the blur
of airplanes and hotels and what city is this today.
A lot. You are sure of it.

But you do not fret. You have become poor
at self recrimination. It is a fruitless task
full of weight and chains. Somewhere between
the self loathing and the blur of travel
is the life you lead now, journeys made
at a speed that allows you to see the landscape
and seasons change before your eyes.

It is that in-between place,
between dusk and dark,
dark and dawn,
when the streetlamps are suddenly uncertain,
on the edge of change.

You have slept so long,
that waking in this moment,
you too, are uncertain
which way the light is traveling.

The Back Roads

Somehow, you always take the back roads.
Narrow. Twisty. The long way around.
Supposedly slow.

And yet, not. That habit you have
of driving too fast for the road
gets you there fast as the highways,

dangerous and exhilarating
both.

About this poem

A bit of history. A bit of now. Some of it has to do with roads.

The picture I used on my blog (www.quarryhouse.us) with this was taken just down the road from my home in West Pawlet, VT.

Tom

It is something out of a Wyeth painting,
the old life saving station at the end of the world,
a museum now, as if no one needed saving any longer.

Maybe they do not, at least not here.
Most who come here are tourists.
They walk the shoreline,
content to go no more than ankle deep,
content with the illusion of the sea
and being there, at the edges.

There are fewer fishermen in deep waters,
those who know the ocean intimately.
Today they have instruments that predate the old station;
instruments that warn them of coming weather,
and bring them in to shore before the worst of it.

And so the old station has become a museum,
a place to remember simpler, more dangerous times,
with oilskins hanging on the walls
and rubber boots on the floors below them.
Photos of rescues past line the wall
for tourists to “oooh” and “ahhhh” over
as if no one needed rescuing today,
a beautiful lie, history. ignored at our own peril.

You stumble on the picture, one of the cats,
the one who started feral,
skinny and covered with sores, crying out
from across two yards, hiding in the brush
and underneath the carcasses of old cars,
until slowly, oh so slowly he came closer
to your outstretched hand. Days. Weeks.
A month. More. But he came.

And here he is, fat and fluffy,
owning his house and yards to both sides,
thoroughly domesticated, hardly remembering
his time of sores, bleeding and hunger,
sure of his place in a world that loves him
unconditionally.

You stumble on the picture,
and think less of the cat than your own life,
and the woman who reminded you that love is
what you believed it could be
later in life than you imagined possible.
If you were a cat, you’d purr.

Mostly, I preach to my self. Talk to myself.
I write what I need to to hear. Self talk,
out loud. So often painting colors
like emotions, spilling out,
water from a dam overrun by storms I cannot name
in the normal scheme of things.

I sit with them, the storms,
longer than more sensible people.
I get wet. Disheveled.
The wind blows me like a scarecrow in July.
I sit with them. Madman in the rain.
But how else do I know if it is a storm
or a shower?

The colors are a bit garish.
No two quite the same.
Not refined. Strong. Loud.
A bit of madness thrown in.
All the makings of a masterpiece.