Outside the rail car is untouched.
Seventy years old and it appears ready
for the next journey
as it languishes in this graveyard
of steel and aluminum.

Inside it is different.
Graffiti and abuse.
Seats ripped from the floor
and piled one on the other.
An old mattress lays at one end.

This is what happens
to travelers like yourself,
left too long in a single place.

When you dated the woman you love, you would drive
two and a half hours for coffee and conversation.
Folks thought you were mad. Perhaps so,
but it is a madness that has plagued you all your life,
this hunger to go, the place never mattering
as much as the journey

Not made of steel and aluminum,
the stillness has left you rotting from inside.
It is worse and more deadly than rust.

It is time to leave this place. To go
before your weaknesses and demons write graffiti,
break the windows and crawl out
of the darkest recesses of your mind.

It is time,
to travel east, towards the sun,
towards the sea, the destination a second thought,
the flight towards light the first.

At the midday tide, the boats are tied and secure,
survivors of another night gathering fish.
The small village has gone quiet,
save for a few tourists.

You are one of those tourists,
happier off the beaten path and familiar photo ops,
content to sit at the tiny coffee house for hours
and simply watch the ebb and flow of the town,

to hear strange language all around you,
to sit still enough, long enough
that you fit in, and disappear in the landscape.

You once wanted to be famous,
before you were broken, shard by shard, eroded
until only the shining shell, that brittle shell
was left, and easy target, easily shattered.

Easily shattered and painstakingly put back together.
Forget fame. Forget the stars, you are content now
just to be alive, a man with roots who travels,
more content to listen than talk, finally aware

other people’s stories matter more than your own,
a container for others’ pain and sadness and salacious tales.
You have become the keeper of secrets,

sipping coffee here at the edge of the Northern Sea,
happiest when alone with the woman you love,
sipping coffee and holding her hand across the table,
watching, always watching, for the next story.

Small Adventures

The bridge is rickey, a floating bridge
over a woodland pond. Rarely traveled,
it floods in the spring,
making the passage if not dangerous,
at least a little messy, a place avoided by most.

There is no obvious view, no reason
to cross the bridge in the wet season.
Nothing draws you except curiosity.

For you, that is enough,
rarely content to wonder,
you have a desire to see,
no matter how messy,
where the journey takes you.

This tendency has not always served you well.
At times, there is nothing worth the journey
on the other side
and you are left wet and worn with nothing to show
but the adventure and stories to tell your children,
reminding them you too still have
some of the wildness of youth buried in your old bones.

You are a collector of mistakes,
some of them unavoidable, some of them not your own,
some of them spectacular.
Most barely noticed. Part of the journey,
to collect them like brim on a line,
then let them go at the end of the day.

You cross the shakey bridge. Your feet grow wet.
On the other side is a clearing of rocks and boulders.
You clamber up in the April sun
and take off your shoes and socks
and lie on the sun while they dry.
You will take a new path home, a dry one,
a safe, if somewhat longer one.

But this small adventure has been a success.
For all its mess, there is healing in the sun
that bakes you and the rocks you lie on,
and if the wet path was a mistake,
it is one you would gladly make again.

Sand. Seagrass. Wind.
You are fed.
Solitude for breakfast.

No longer the guardian.
No longer the hero.
Simply a soldier, a pawn in the battle,
unnoticed, fighting your own small battles,
your shield and skin and soul marked,
somehow still standing,
somehow able to wake in the new morning,
stand, and prepare for battle one more time.

There are no victories,
only the tide of war, the ebb and flow.
and a determination not to drown
in your own blood,
sure now, after a decade and more,
that you will not die of your wounds.

Even the broken
have power.
It is all a matter of how, or if
you choose to wield it.

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.

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.

The first time I visited, I walked the streets at night,
past closed stores and brightly lit restaurants
with their specials proudly displayed in the street.
The smell of onions, meat and seafood grilling
wafted into the street. Temptation.

I could hear the bay, soft waves and wind.
In one dark corner, a bar, the Grotto.
Faintly, I heard music, raucus Southern rock,
out of place at this end of the world New England spot.
I smiled at the dichotomy. Temptation.

There was a time, long ago,
when bars were my second home,
much as diners and dives are today.
I would sit in the corner, and listen,
and watch people through the smoke.
I don’t think I ever picked up a woman in a bar.
I never got quite drunk. but I loved the atmosphere,
loose and sad and unrestrained, for better or worse,
an alcohol fueled honesty.
As I walked by, someone opens the door to leave
and you can smell the smoke. Temptation.

I made my way through the town. And back again,
giving each temptation a second chance to lure me in.
And why not? Why not surrender?
There is nothing in any of these doorways
that would reduce me to sinner status.
Well, maybe a little gluttony, but momentary, no more.
My soul would survive that.

But I am not here for these things. I am here for peace,
and I turn away from the noise and walk towards the pier.
Most of the fishing boats are gone, at work during the night.
The ones left bob on the waves.
Work lights flood the decks. Ropes are deftly coiled.
I breath in the air, A mix of salt
and the remnants of yesterday’s catch.
In one of the smaller boats an old man mends nets.
He nods. I nod back.

It has been a good trip. Tomorrow I drive home.
There is the one last temptation. To stay.
But I will pass by this one as well.
Living at the end of the world has its charm
but those I love and those that love me
live five hours away. My life is not my own
and I would not want it to be.
As beautiful a temptation solitude can be,
in the end, isolation is the enemy.

You have learned this the hard way,
and dense as you are, you rarely make the same mistake twice,
no matter the temptation.

Just on the other side, the path disintegrates.
The clear border fences stop
and you are forced to face the chaos
without the clarity of those who have gone before you,

forced to fall back on your ancient teaching
of sunfall and internal compasses,
trusting the lichen on trees and sharp shadows
to lead you, if not to your destination,

at least to safety

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

In the markets of Venice, snails writhe,
not merely fresh but alive, clambering
one over the others as if they know
their garlic and oil-infused future.

Fish lay on the tables, tails whipping,
eyes open and aware. Shrimp, legs dancing
a jitterbug in wooden bins in the morning light.
It is all a bit disturbing and fascinating

to someone like you accustomed
to shrink-wrapped perfection, every thing you eat
packaged and perfect, safely dead and cleaned,
no momentary discomfort in the actual act of dying.

Ah, but the taste that night! as you sip your white wine
and dine on scallops freshly pried from their shells,
the snails sauteed. As if the rawness itself
drew created a whole new perfection.

This is what you have learned in your years
of allowing strangers into your life. Broken strangers.
The dying. The inconsolable. They are less pretty,
none destined to be a perfect Instagram vision.

They die. They struggle.
They flail like snails in the market, determined to live
when the world around them prefers shrink-wrapped perfection.
They are uncomfortable to be around

and yet, strangely beautiful, Real. Raw.
The few who survive are always scarred.
And yet, you feel a strange allure, somehow made more
in their brief flicker of survival.

At some point, you realize
it is more than wanton destruction
or the need for an outlet.

There is art in it, purpose,
and messages as bold and secret
as those of the grandmasters

and you stop shaking your head
and you stop in the open-air museum
and try to understand

what lied beneath the visual rant,
People passing wonder at you standing there,
head cocked in thought,

“Silly man!”, they whisper between themselves,
“May as well understand God as this drivel.”
But they would be wrong.

God is easy. He leaves his messages in the open,
allowing us to complicated them
with prejudice and a need to control.

Art though, is hard. We lack the code
that lives inside the head of the artist
with the spray paint,

but the prejudices are just as strong.
Still, you try and in the trying,
the loud graffiti on the wall becomes yours,

at least a little bit.
And you become just a little more human
in the effort to understand.

It tilts. It moves.
The floor falls out underneath you.
The rules change. The light shifts and flickers.
Somewhere, someone is laughing
maniacally.
Somewhere, too often, someone is crying.
Faces leap out at you,
implacable and unfeeling,
somehow worse than
the monsters we were taught to fear,
blind to blood.
There is music. Here and there a note rings
false, as if the music itself is a lie.
In the distance, where the light lives,
there is another song,
a weeping anthem of hope and revolution.
You were not prepared to be so unsettled,
so unsure which way your safety lies.
A scream fills the air. Not a shriek to scare,
but of pain. Somewhere in the dark.
There is no one to lead you. Each ghoul
beckons you in dark corners,
sinister in their suits. Blood on their cuffs.
In the end, you fall back on your faith.
John calls you in a faint whisper.
“Forward.”  Always forward.
Through the darkness, toward the light.
Leave the ghouls behind to whither
in their own darkness.
You will not allow it to be yours.

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.

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.

The tide is low and you can see most of the boat’s ladder,
slimy and green below the high tide mark,
dry and growing brittle above,
subject to sun and salt each day, no matter the weather.

The ladder is the way up, the way out
from the fishing boats that populate this pier.
No matter the undertow below,
no matter the direction.

There are other materials that might last longer
than the locust wood used to make the rungs and stringers,
materials less susceptible to the slow death
of the seaside docks,

But the wood ladder remains. When it fails,
another one will take its place,
new wood gleaming for a week or two
before turning grey,
the persistence of weather taking its toll.

But the wood has a certain feel. A realness
that resonates to these men of the sea,
a trueness to who they are, and the all too real
world they live in.

It will remain their material of choice,
a thing you can run your hand over
and feel the truth of life, that it comes
and goes, that age takes its toll,

and maintenance is everything.

Sun cuts through the slats of the fences,
light and shadow on the sand.

The ocean is calm today.
Soft waves wash against the shore.

A serenade. A lullaby.
A hymn of thanksgiving.

It is enough to sit here. To feel the sun.
Time disappears. You disappear in the landscape.

You have come to understand what you are
and a few of the whys. It is enough.

You are content to know less, feel more.
Know less, experience more

without the luggage of a life lived spottily, strangely,
too often lacking answers.

In the distance, gulls cry out.
In the distance, clouds nudge the horizon.

Wind ruffles your hair. You smell the salt.
And you wonder at how long it took you

to lose yourself. To find yourself.
To understand the meaning of enough.

It snowed again last night, just enough
to cover the ground, not enough
to slow life in any way. You drove right through it,

past the fields and barns, past the forests
with limbs lined with white. Feathers falling.

It is more than a post card. These are working farms.
Cows are being fed and milked.
Steam rises from piles of manure.
Goats too, are milked, Cheese is being made.
Early mornings and late nights. The work continues
no matter the weather.

Here, life is defined by seasons. By weather.
Sun and rain and snow and drought have meaning
beyond the soft contours of the ground,
beyond colors or the lack of colors.

You did not know it, but you needed that reminder,
that return to your summer roots, summers spent
on your grandfather’s farm, feeding pigs
and hoeing peanuts with black men who sang hymns.
My grandfather and I sang along.

In the heat of the day, we would all disperse.
He and I would go to the mill pond deep in the woods
and fish. He used bait. I did not.
It was the being there that mattered.

I spent my lifetime working in cities,
It was a good life and it was part of what has formed me.
but distance and time have a cost. Things get lost.
I had no idea what coming here, to Nowhere, Vermont,
would do to restore my connection to the dirt
that birthed us all.

The snow is soft in the morning light,
soft in the morning fog.
A line of trees cuts the fields in front of you.
Steam rises off the creek.

You have built a still life,
simple. Peaceful, still moving,
like creek waters under the ice.
Unseen and relentless,

a strange combination
that has become natural to you,
comfortably invisible,
happy in the January light,

happy to wait for the change in seasons,
walking, seeing the signs,
the willows turning yellow, almost green,
new growth in the wood briars, sharp and red,

color in unexpected places.

Unexpected unless you have lived
through many winters,
growing stronger and wiser in each one,
learning finally that time is not king,

Effort,
vision,
love and persistence rule
the secret life of winter.

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.

Many of the tools you wield were your father’s,
and his father’s before him.
Old steel and wood with the patina of age and sweat.
When you palm any of them,
more than work passes through your hands.
Lives lived. Generations of repair, knowledge
passed down with callouses and sweat,
the kind of wisdom that knows no age or era,
slow work, a recognition of the soul of things,
that those same things were not made for impermanence,
nor were the lives that made them.

You own nothing.
The houses and things that surround you,
the people who live in your circumference
are your companions and friends,
Never yours to own. You do your work.
Choose your colors, use your old tools
to help them through their time with you,
and then, they are gone. Someone else’s.
Or someone else. Never you. Never yours.

Your contentment is in the restoration. In the repair.
Without expectation, always surprised.
Doing the best you are able with what you know
and these old tools you carry.
They have served you well.

But it is a new time and there is a temptation to believe
you need new tools.
The temptation is strong. It is powerful, that belief
that time has made the old ones obsolete.
From time to time you have succumbed,
but always you have been proved wrong.
The old tools work just fine. They are slower, true,
and more work is needed, a bit more understanding
of the wood you work, the iron you forge, true,
but these tools were themselves crafted
to create, repair and restore things that last.
There is nothing temporary in them,
and your faithfulness in their use has a strange power,
hand hewn eternity, full of history, and promise both.

The scaffolding stands next to the stucco wall.
A maze of pipe and connectors, splattered
with a barrage of old paint.
Thick boards span the space from brace to brace,
strong enough to hold you
as you do the work.

There is nothing glamorous in it,
the scraping of old paint,
the replacement of rot,
it is hard, sweaty work.
Slow. It is slow.
It takes a long time
before you can celebrate the results.

It gets worse before it gets better.
That is part of it.
Each step, particularly at the beginning,
is an act of faith.

There will be surprises.
Any place with history will have them,
buried under the paint and plaster.
And each surprise will take more work,
detours. No need to plan or schedule.
You just do the work.
Day by day,
until it is done.

The faithful are always rewarded.
The old can, indeed, become new.
To an outsider, it seems like magic,
but you know the truth:
it is work.

It is a strange kind of spring,
autumn leaves, the stragglers and survivors
that clung to the white-clad birches all winter,
have let loose, their yellow leaves a carpet
covering the April grass and its greening.

Typical of New England, there is no continuity of weather.
One day the sun warms your skin like a lover’s touch,
and next day is cold and snowy, cutting like betrayal.

It is a season of plague and quarantine,
a cruel joke, making us all prisoners of fear,
like birch leaves, hanging on, clinging
until the season changes.

I am not a worrier.
I was cured of worry, I believed, a decade and a half ago,
surviving more than I believed I could then,
nothing now seems as consequential.
but I worry now.

I worry for the children,
mine and the ones that surround me.
I worry for the doctors and nurses,
for the people who stock my stores at night,
for the myriad of people I know
who have built their livelihoods,
suddenly fragile, unexpected deaths to the plague.
I worry for the poor. I know too many of them
for them to be an abstraction. No care, no money,
what little life they have crumbles.
I worry about the loud ones, the deniers
and all they touch, proud carriers of disease.
What will become of them?
I worry for the elderly, huddled, too often
already victims of loneliness,
a new vulnerability suddenly added to the frailness of age.
I worry about…. the list is too long.
I pray, but the list is too long, too easy
to leave someone loved out,
until at last I cry out to God in a great groan
that says more than my words,
and I lean into him, knowing he knows,
more than I, the loss and fear and need
for comfort and strength beyond what I have.

I walk across the yellow leaves of spring.
Freshly stripped off the trees in yesterday’s rain,
they are supple and a thing of beauty.
But this will not last. In a few days they will dry
and turn brown, and fall to dust beneath my feet,
no longer survivors, but victims and all that is left to me
is prayer and the power to remember their beauty
and share it, long after they are gone

The house is built
on posts and beams.

Thick, hand-hewn posts of local cedar,
the beams as big crossing space,
held together by a single peg
since the early nineteenth century.

You’d not know it’s age to look at it.
Windows have been replaced.
Walls torn asunder and replaced.
There is plaster and electricity,
all the modern conveniences.

But in the end,
it is post and beam.
Incredibly, solidly constructed
in such a way that space is spanned
and everything between and underneath
can be ripped out and replaced,
renewed and reworked,
becoming new again
without losing its strength.

Sunlight comes through the window.
The wooden bowl casts a shadow,
beautiful, simple.

This morning, again, you are in no hurry.
Your life has slowed down and there is time
to see.

Transparent and Dark

The old venue reaches across the boardwalk,
its magic long evaporated,
a victim of neglect and storms in equal measure.

There are windows. high and void of glass,
the sashes lacking paint.
Rot is plentiful.

There are windows, high and dark,
perfectly clear, with nothing to see
save the perpetual night inside.

You stand below, knowing this is what others see
when they look at you,
transparent and dark,

overwhelmed by neglect and storms,
strangely unwilling
to succumb.

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.

I am thankful for the trespassers.
for those who dared breach my walls
gently but firmly, who passed through
my locked doorways carrying candles,
determined to do no harm, determined
to raise me from the dead.

It’s not very pretty, this old fishing boat.
Paint is peeled and the brass is pitted.
There is rust on the anchor
and the porthole glass is glazed with salt.

But each day it leaves the harbor
and finds its way to deep waters.
Nets are dropped and fish are caught.
And each night it returns.

As a boy, you waited by the tracks,
often for hours in a hot summer’s day.
Sweat bees hovered around you,
their tiny stings keeping you awake as you waited.

Hours sometimes. Half a day.
You waited, never knowing the schedule, but sure
the train would come, eventually.

You heard it before you saw it.
A low rumbling in the ground beneath you,
until finally, it came,
the blunt engines, dark and menacing
and then the long chain of cars.

Coal cars, each one piled high with black stone,
shining in the sun, fresh hewn from the West Virginia mines.
Here and there, a few chunks fall,
enough to build a fire in the night.

But not now. For now, you sit,
the earth rumbling beneath you,
the steady click-clack of the wheels,
watching the occasional spark of steel against steel,
waiting, waiting for that last car,

the caboose, red with its windows dark.
No evidence of life, but you knew; you always knew
someone was there,
someone, not you, not yet, but someone,
was traveling around the bend,
far from your little boy’s world,
and part of you traveled with him,

A yearning that has never left you.
Wanderlust, that bit of a boy that still lives
in this gray-haired shell, waiting at the crossing
as the train passes by,
more than patient,
you smile, remembering not who you were,
but who you are.

You sit down with your coffee.
The short order cook is busy at the grill.
Things you cannot see sizzle.

There is music here. There is always musc here.
Eclectic and sometimes strange, rarely
what you would think of as morning music,
quirky and boppy with a bass beat you feel,
one of the benefits of a place run by musicians
instead of accountants.

The coffee is good. Rich. Almost, but not quite harsh.
Alive. A tonic for the past night’s dreams.
They were joyous things, your dreams,
full of blue skies and Abba,
interiours out of Architectural Digest,
beautiful and simple and white.
But always interrupted by betrayal.
You would wake, and insist on sleeping again,
hoping for a different ending that never bore fruit.

Better to wake. Better to shake off the lies of the night,
a power that rises only when you wake,
and like a soldier before battle, prepare yourself
for what is real.

A duck cuts the water, leaving a thin wake in the quarry.
It is silent. No wind.

You have sat here for a pair of hours, emptying yourself
of questions, of vitriol and doubt, waiting patiently

to see what is left.

The thing is, the lesson is, I survived.
Never mind the rust or the abandonment
or the sabotage or the self sabotage,
or the wandering in the wilderness,
bars and hitchhiking in the night,
the wrong turns and the right turns unrecognized,
or the helpers and healers, the jacklegs,
quacks, shamen and priests.
Never mind the things that came undone,
and the constant rearranging of fate
or God’s insistence in letting me stew
in my own juices. Never mind
the arrows or thorns or innocent bystanders
content to watch me bleed, those who
see me as entertainment or suspect.
Never mind the constant need for maintenance,
the broken parts, the ones I could fix
and the ones I could not,
the depression, the fear, the fight,
the checkered past, a perfect target
for any who care to shoot.
Never mind all of it. The parts that recovered
and the parts that never will.
The blood shed! So much of it.
So many tears. So much lostness,
darkness and fire. The wars. The surety
that you were never made for the world you live in,
the anger
I felt, uncomfortable with it every time it rises, and
the anger
aimed at me, a thing more comfortable to you,
more familiar,
but no less weaponized,
Never mind all of it.

I survived.
I found love. I gave love.
Some things I did, mattered.
At times, there is joy.

Don’t tell me there is no God.
I know better.
I survived.

Build me a house with many windows.
A house with many doors
to let the air waft through on an autumn morning,
to let the light in, to let me see the world outside.

Do not hang any curtains.
Set the furniture looking out.
and if strangers look in, fine.
They will see what they will see,
what is there, not all of it Better Homes and Gardens.

I am done hiding in the dark. It does not suit me.
I am too old for such foolishness.
Too old for hide and seek.
So build me a house. A new house.
A place bright and open.
Let the dusty corners show.
Let the leftover coffee linger on the kitchen table.
Breathe in the air like a monk
learning to dance.

Here in Vermont, the winters are cold,
sometimes brutal, never gentle,
a teasing sort of punishment for those of us who stay.

And so it is at the end of April, snow is blowing
and there is a sheen of ice across the quarry
and you find yourself indoors in what should be a season of sun.

There is no normal here. That is what you discovered.
Behind the bucolic scenery and towns postcarded
like 1955, every ill lives here that lives in the cities you left behind,

hidden behind prettier backdrops perhaps,
but we are excused nothing for the privilege of living
in a land without billboards.

That is not a complaint. I love it here,
and since we all suffer in this life. (It is sure as seasons.)
better to choose your place of pain.

The snow falls. The sun shines. It is cold again.
No matter. You have fresh flowers on the window.
Coffee brews. You are in a good place in a bad time.

Who could wish for more?

This too shall pass. So says the bible.
Only it never did. We did, and we believe it so fervently
we gave it biblical status,

proving at that at times we can uncover
wisdom on our own, and so, give our suffering
meaning.

This is what you do.
You mourn.
And mourn more.
For as long as you need to be lost in it.
There is no timetable to mourning.

You do not.
Can not.
Will not
lose the loss.
That is not how it works.

You live it
and in time,
when you are ready,
and not one minute earlier,
you find room for something else.

Something small.
But something nonetheless.
And you let it in.
And then something else.
and yet another.

You decide.
When.

You learn. That’s the thing in it all.
you learn that it never fades, the mourning.
It will always be there, just behind the eyes.
Always.

But you learn there is more to you.
Room for more.
That hearts are far larger than the cavity that holds them.
Hearts are where eternity lives.
They are infinite.
But only
when we are ready;
for mourning has no time.

Someone lived here once.
Families were raised.
Gardens were grown.
Animals, pets and livestock, wandered about.
Clothes hung on the line.
There were children and lovers and hopes,
bright as sunflowers.

Once. Not now.

Now, the neglect has driven them all away.
What was it? Poverty?
What was it? Broken hearts and trauma?
Too much to survive?
Greener grass waved in front of them,
a temptress,
and no one left to fill the walls anew.
Eventually, always, an abandonment.

It’s a cute little house, well situated
in a post card colored field.
Still savable, but you have lived here long enough
to know how this story goes.

You have restored a few homes in your day,
brought then back from the brink,
none of them a perfect restoration. Few are.
But enough that there was life in them again.
Gardens and hopes bloomed anew
and the paint shown bright. The rot removed.
They became homes again,
not merely houses, waiting to fall.

But you cannot save them all.

It is the lesson you learned in your own restoration.
There is only so much of you
and you will use it as well as you are able.
restoring those closest to you
as you work on yourself.
It should be enough,

but still, you mourn.

“You should write about the fear,” she said.
“It’s six months out, and perhaps less raw.
People are fearful now, and it might help.”

My hand drifts absently down to my belly
and the collection of six scars.
I barely remember the fear of the time.
Shock is like that.
It was one day at a time, at times
just one hour at a time
for months before, and even here, now
months after.

Not so much the fear of dying.
I have danced close to that drear druid
before. He is no stranger to me
and I lost my fear of him when I was but eighteen.

It is the manner. The pain, the possibility
of months and years of being so unable,
of the loss I might leave behind, those ripples
of how much less I might become, and have,

and never knowing that in that less,
there might be more, something different emerges.
It was only being able to feel the moment
and the moment being this terrible thing
that could **** me in little descendant notes,

the possibility that I would be robbed of the joy
in a woman newly discovered, children newly launched,
in a lack of possibility stolen by mere survival.

That was the fear. And part of it still lurks.
The recovery so strong, so good, and yet still,
so incomplete and you wonder, despite the progress,
despite the rehab,
despite the still day to day work of it all,
how much of you will return
and how much will not,
and more importantly,
what you will replace the missing parts with,
how you can calm the ripples of loss
and replace them with something more,
waves of power and joy.