Time and Life have been wandering around the brain cells recently. Between my upcoming milestone reunion, trying to make plans for this semester and the future and yet, more school shootings--the brevity of time has been underscored lately. This poem showed up from the lovely peeps at The Writer's Almanac; it captures well what I've been trying to articulate this week.
Eventually the future shows up everywhere:
those burly summers and unslept nights
in deep
lines and dark splotches, thinning skin.
Here's the corner store grown to a condo,
the bike reduced to one spinning wheel,
the ghost of a dog that used to be,
her trail
no longer trodden, just a dip in the weeds.
The clear water we drank as thirsty children
still runs through our veins.
Stars we saw then
we still see now,
only fewer, dimmer, less often.
The old tunes play and continue to move us
in spite of our learning, the wraith of romance,
lost innocence, literature, the death of the poets.
We continue to speak, if only in whispers,
to something inside us that longs to be named.
We name it the past and drag it behind us,
bag like a lung filled with shadow and song,
dreams of running, the keys to lost names.
"Dark Charms" by Dorianne Laux, from The Book of Men. © Norton, 2011.
All of the inchoate longings of a new year, wondering why I am not then in a new place or a new home. Having been here since September, and am amazed by how unsettled I still feel. Is it this, then, dragging behind me that which longs to be named? What do I name it, then, but regret?
ReplyDelete