If you’re all alone on Thanksgiving Day, with no turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, and gravy, your heart aching from loneliness and neglect, and your shame keeping you from making even one single phone call to some relative who is surrounded by devoted loved ones, just keep in mind that, for what it’s worth, we’re together in this poem, sharing these words. Sleepy late-afternoon football chatter will fade away, but this conversation will last
In May I poke eleven pie pumpkin seeds into dirt. I bless them into a star shape in that limed bed, another year. I wonder if I’ll be here at harvest. I haul myself up, grab onto a rusted scaffold for the vines to climb, drape into the summer winds, mingle with wrens. Glad to be here as their heart leaves sway into dry Augusts and mildew in September. Today
I dug for you in the deep rich soil, my hands plunging further and further into the ground, into the past, searching for traces of your soul, only to find a decayed, unreadable letter.
I peer out the sunroom window at the hydrangeas encroaching on the arborvitae, on the camelia — and just now in mid-November when the tight buds of the camelia are grasping at every bit of waning sun they can to bloom and the arborvitae is struggling to spread its branches; next month they’ll be the only green in the garden. They can’t do this by themselves. How can I disturb
you moved that dial from comfort to gone, something compelling you drawing you to firing line and desert sands or some great field with thorns and you wrote a letter to that love you left and she cried on its ink, staining an image of loss, nonetheless, she drew on you. you moved in line to beats that we can’t know having not stepped out, having not been there, but
The shades enter and leave each frame in unexpected ways. Being human means being part of the projection. I’m a visitor, here for a while but then off to somewhere else, wearing the body and everything that goes with it. The accessories make us think this is who we are, but they’re just borrowed trappings cloaking the penetralium, tight-fitting suits we have to wear until the ceremony is over.
