Receding Winter
Tonight I will sit here by this ragged railing.
I can see you pace around your room, your clumsy arms groping
Around, your face set in that familiar frown.
Do you know my darling, that i'm standing here holding up a candle?
So that you don't trip over those little things that I know you've left lying around.
I know what you're thinking of.
Our sun-kissed Saturday mornings.
French toast off those hideous purple paper plates.
Sleazy songs on the antique newly-repaired radio.
Running barefoot on the un-mowed dew drenched grass.
I liked all that; you are so easy to love.
Now you're thinking of those hot, sticky nights that we stayed up to talk,
while we stared at the green and grey moths whirring closer and closer to the dull lampshade.
I had winced, you'd wanted to keep them as pets. Then we'd talked.
About skimming stones from a lighthouse and eating half molten bourbon biscuits,
About the music of old cuckoo clocks, and the uses of orange zest.
About french pronunciations and the cutest cats of the neighborhood
About distant eccentric aunts and their eccentric bequests.
We had laughed a lot then, the curtains stirred from our laughter.
Now I know your mind will turn to those blue-green hills that we went to, streaked with rain.
You are so poetic, I could not help loving you when you asked me,
'What do these trees talk about, locked in their complex tangles?
Where do these birds bury their dead kin?
What scuttled behind that intricate rustle of bright hued bush?'
Where your childlike questions ended, there did my far-fetched answers begin.
Now you'll shake your head in tiny, nervous shakes, and
Look down at this railing across which we'd smiled at each other for the first time.
You'll blink rapidly to check if its really me you're looking at again.
Then you'll bite your lip, scratch your head and smile, tentatively first,
Then right to the depths of your chocolate eyes.
I'll smile back, wont i?
3 comments:
super stuff.
First, let me say, this poem is flat out amazing, it's so incredibly rich and resonant with benevolent simplicity that I keep having to go back to bask in it's soft radiance. It almost makes me cringe to have to resort to words like 'benevolent' and 'radiance' to describe it, when this poem is so inexplicably full of suburban imagery and the smell of old toys. I love it, it takes me back to bygone times when I used to watch this show 'Kipper' and wonder what it would be like to have an attic. It makes me dreamy in a way that spirituality cannot touch.
This poem is so simple, so easy to read and so effortless to enjoy. There are no layers or hidden metaphors to try to tease out, or any serious or philosophical message to acknowledge. It's so refreshingly simple, it doesn't even go below the skin or into the mind, there are no descriptions of emotions or metaphors for thought processes or any kind of poetic jargon, just things at face value. Reading this makes me think, do we think too much about love? About life? We almost always assign a transcendental and spiritual status to love, measuring it against lofty ideals and slaving over it with convoluted explanations and big words, but what is the love that we can see? What is love at face value? It's just the things in this poem - french toast, adorable cats, skimming stones and childish questions. Objects and activities, this is what raw love is. We can never truly know what the other feels, so it's only through these materialistic means that we can come close to the ideal, to harmony. And this is humbling in an inexplicable way. The same goes for life, everyone's always on about finding yourself and spiritual development and forming connections with other people and crap, but what life comes down to ultimately is the clutter that you've accumulated around yourself and all he stories that it tells. These things you ended up with, these things you did, these human memories and objects, these are the things that make life, these are things that you can look back on, visceral experiences and ripe memories, life is an antique store, this realization is again very humbling. And of course, that person, who was the reason for you picking out all these things to buy or borrow or steal, to clutter your life with, who was the reason you went through all those experiences, because that was the person you wanted to get closer to and you didn't know of any other way. All these things around you are here because of that person, of all your possessions that one tells the best story, the story of your life. And there's nothing more heartening than to look at your life smiling back at you from a corner. Beautiful poem, I absolutely loved it.
love it sramana!!!
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