May's offering at The Granary.
Staple of a life lived well,
binding together both frontal
an rear sheaths of skin
as they sense breezes, smell
lilacs, or taste onions
and upon aging, glad of the
constant pain in the hip
(it reminds one of life
lived)
as long as the pain isn’t too
sharp, like when spurred to a trot
or forced to feel the effects
of a falling barometer.
Still, reclining on the grass
in a park by the sea,
The wheels turn early
as the sun mounts his chariot
wind changing direction,
bells on the fishing boats returning
to port
agitating the filaments of
wakefulness
and bringing hunger for
movement.
Like an unusual organ removed
years ago while we slept
Every so often I reach back
to wipe the sweat and feel the scar
yet tender-
and on occasion, I stretch to
scratch and pull the hand back red with blood
so that while blood runs,
seldom do I recall why or when or how that part was removed,
Or what it was, really;
perhaps it was worth it…
Many ghosts follow
like warm or unduly chill breezes
on dark summer nights
or out of place, colorful insects
at midwinter
calling my forgotten parts
back from a place
far away and inaccessible.
How can the old and new join
to marry my lost and disjointed members
as run the hues of an
autumnal sunset
in January’s decline and
lingering nights?
It is all paint laid on,
layer after layer,
shade within color and hue-
I know by heart a few
strained descriptions of the refuge that remains
and consistently avert the
gazes of those and that which has passed.
We are all somehow programmed
for stardom with a view of the sea-
and even at this point in the
race, my view feels sometimes like a big-screen image on a twin sheet, suspended
in the garden.
This life could be so much
more-
and at the insistence of this
description,
taking our landscape and
peeling it back like a wrapper,
we each learn that we lean on
this beautiful scaffold
for just long enough.
