Late Days

There was a song she sang with her eyes

if only in passing

a lullaby sculpted in sadness and yet

   sung with celebration and joy…

and this is what I knew of her

And so the morning sky squatted down

with overcast tones

cracking open only to give birth to

a confusion of sun and cloud

lying naked across the table, crying

I sat at a chair there, staring at a cup

empty enough to count,

swathed in light and shadow and thirst,

unsure of what if any

meaning even the least of it might hold

Beginnings must beg their endings, I guessed,

rising up to no occasion,

pushing myself from the table

with little resistance

and no really clear sense of where to go

It was later in the night that the candle would ignite

golden diamonds in her eyes

on which she delicately balanced all caution

against the passion of the flickering light,

encapsulating the questions of the day into the mysteries of the night

I arose from the table and stepped back into myself,

turning only not to see

in another direction, as the splinters of light

strewn across the table behind me

slipped and faded away into the distant corners of the room

Late season cicadas sang of summers lost

as I opened the door to step out

into the world in which we only pretend to own control

the purpose and direction of the path

lying before me partially obscured by overgrown weed and grass

The hours were due to drift by too slowly

before coming to an end too soon,

the designs that my mind had held the days before

to be obligations on these very passing minutes

had lost all color and focus between then and now

  

And yet she would hold the evening in her hand

as if it were a brush

with which she might create the very vision

of every human emotion

without so much as a conscious thought of doing so

There were things to do – I knew –

places to stop without going,

thoughts to capture before their outlines

dissipated into the shadows,

simple things now too complex to figure out

In a way, this day had a sense of needing to

start over again, maybe more than once,

there was nothing there to see past it with,

no glass clear enough through which

it might pause long enough to reflect upon itself

If this is it, this is what it is, it might have told me

as if saying such a thing could be

what it would be like to be imbued with wisdom,

but there was not conscious truth to

each step that I had taken or would yet take – they simply were

Time, when it arrived, would find me neither

sitting, standing, knelt nor dancing,

there could be no determined approach into,

away from, or around

the song with which she sang her every move

For now, the ground simply slipped away beneath me

with more direction than intention,

simple, sweet sunlight streamed past like a series

of post cards sent as if to suggest

that there might yet be other places toward which to go

But I cannot remember now quite where it was that

I did or did not quite get to,

   only that faintest of choruses of distant sounds…

the saws, the cicadas, birds and crickets, the

whole host of breeze-borne voices muffled by something to the air

Set two places at the table and wait

for an empty chair to gain meaning

conversations come and go without the need

  for someone to share them with –

It’s never the words themselves that crave the company

The greatest accomplishment of some late days

  is simply making it through them –

eventually our bearings will remind themselves

of what and where they are,

eventually something in everything will make as much sense as we allow it

  

Talk’s only talk – traded across a table with

   someone who is or is not there…

at the same table I rose and stepped away from hours before

it is the evening sweeping down around me

it is the light in the evening that will capture me for all and more than I know

She will smile with a shy sincerity that will beguile me

she will allow me the pleasure

of aching for places unknown and unseen

and I will wonder how it is that I might touch such a thing

even as I wilt before the glorious sparkling of its light.