Originally written for Sammi Scribbles Weekend Writing Challenge- Using Question in exactly 84 words but I didn’t get back to edit it down until today.
Questions hang in the air
Like heavy coastal fog
On cool autumn mornings
Eternal questions of humanity:
All the whys, the wonderings--
Never answered prayers--
Laying pressed between the
Pages of a book like brown,
Dried flowers—forgotten,
Having lost their sentiment.
Speak the differences
Among roses, weeds, wildflowers—
Inconsequential answers
For inconsequential questions.
Could sense of counting
Out the hours be sliced
Like blood, blooming meat
To find truth absolute
Like high priestesses of old,
Scry the answer
In a blood filled bowl?
With ramshackle shards
Of heart, soul, self
Falling away like the browned petals
Of a long-wilted bouquet,
We create a riotous noise
In ramshackle attempts
To find some connection.
Lumbering, awkward attempts
At reaching out to touch once again,
To replace, to freshen
The brown wilted and missing parts
With new bouquets of spring
Whose stems sit in eternally
Fresh, clean waters.
We dream of a life lived
No longer ramshackle,
With no long-wilted bouquets
Of a past to haunt with falling petals,
But a life returning whole,
To move without noise
Through the world once again.
She will never fall to earth again
After soaring among the stars,
The planets a blur. No.
No. She will never swim
In the deepest oceans,
Cavorting with dolphins and whales. No.
No. Never will her soul fly,
Brushing shoulders with angels,
Their wings touching upon her face. No.
No. Never these things.
Never these dangerous things again.
Never allowing illusions to gain sway. No.
No. She will plant her feet firmly in the ground.
Her heart cemented in her chest. Yes.
Yes. That once mighty waterfall
Has slowed to a trickle
As there no longer exist
Any waterfall wishes.
I first wrote this a few years ago after reading Elizabeth Bishop’s work once again. Well, after revisiting Mary Oliver and gaining familiarity with Pablo Neruda this summer, I once again returned to Bishop’s work and then had to re-watch Reaching for the Moon. So I decided to dig this one out and tweak it and revise.
In this thing called losing,
Bishop said we become masters
And that losing isn’t a disaster.
No, not a disaster.
Losing socks and such stuff.
I’ve lost earrings, bracelets,
Expensive ones too, didn’t care
Beyond maybe a minute or two,
And never was it a disaster.
And no pain beyond a stab of nostalgia
Did I have upon saying goodbye
To three houses and two cities,
And never did I feel it a disaster.
And yes, it was no disaster
To bury my mother,
A father who really wasn’t,
The man who really was,
First one brother, then the other,
Then lastly, a wife.
With each, my body and soul
Savaged by a catastrophic hurricane, yes.
But no, no disaster.
No disaster is it, I’ll admit,
For a tiny bit of soul to erode
As I buried each.
But nothing, nothing did I ever master.
Except, maybe this—
I did not look for them-
Looking to forget them
Since they were gone,
Emptied of this earth.
No, I did not look to forget
While driving home
In darkness under a full moon
Lighted with regret
Of a new unfamiliar scent.
Yet the swirling of this sad scent
Is no, no real disaster.
No real disaster is it—
That I look to forget
A lost return now.
A return to life
Captured, fleeting, lost--
Filled with a scent
Of hope or a fool’s thought—
Matters not but now lost.
And in this thing
Called losing,
In which I am well-schooled,
As are we all,
I have tried to make an art,
To make an art of all this loss.
Yes, this may be no real disaster,
But Bishop lied.
There is no art in losing,
No art at all,
That I can find to master.
Walking through days---
There are too many left
And not enough
To let me forget.
I walk into sunrises
Into sunsets--
There are not enough
Sunrises or sunsets left
In life to let me forget
And too many yet to live
To live in remembering.
I walk to gain forgetfulness.
There are not enough miles,
Not enough steps,
Not enough earth
To walk
To bring
About forgetfulness.
I walk, seeking shelter
From thunderstorms
Yet they remind me.
I walk, seeking exhaustion
In the mountains
Yet they remind me.
I walk, seeking the healing of salt
From ocean waters
Yet they remind me.
All speaking
In whispers
Of the earth’s remembrance.
It all reminds me—
The brilliant azure sky,
The verdant green of forests,
The primal roar of oceans,
The Rorschach shape of clouds,
The roil gray of storms—
It all reminds me,
Brings me back
Nothing allows me to forget.
What is it that you wish to know?
How someone could live with
The edges of a life chipped away,
Breath not taken, suffocated,
Heart stilled,
Walking dead
Through the days of life,
Just so onlookers believe
The pretense they wish to see?
While I, struggling for air,
For the beating rhythms of life,
Having lived too long inside a shrinking skin,
Become petrified wood, stone,
Armored in minerals.
Only so close.
Only so close.
For I have lived years and years
Of rings and more rings,
All mineralized,
Surrounding the core
Of me. Nothing
Could truly touch,
Know the center.
Nothing ever did
Perhaps, ever will.
It is easy to live
As stone.
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