At the midday tide, the boats are tied and secure,
survivors of another night gathering fish.
The small village has gone quiet,
save for a few tourists.

You are one of those tourists,
happier off the beaten path and familiar photo ops,
content to sit at the tiny coffee house for hours
and simply watch the ebb and flow of the town,

to hear strange language all around you,
to sit still enough, long enough
that you fit in, and disappear in the landscape.

You once wanted to be famous,
before you were broken, shard by shard, eroded
until only the shining shell, that brittle shell
was left, and easy target, easily shattered.

Easily shattered and painstakingly put back together.
Forget fame. Forget the stars, you are content now
just to be alive, a man with roots who travels,
more content to listen than talk, finally aware

other people’s stories matter more than your own,
a container for others’ pain and sadness and salacious tales.
You have become the keeper of secrets,

sipping coffee here at the edge of the Northern Sea,
happiest when alone with the woman you love,
sipping coffee and holding her hand across the table,
watching, always watching, for the next story.

Maybe Remembered

Some call it art. Some do not.
Prattle perhaps. Scribble.
It shows up in the night.
It is read by strangers and friends.
Passers by.
Bits of it resound. Maybe remembered.

It fades with the weather.
That is the nature of it.
Circumstances that resonated a week, a season,
moments that made it all resonate
before it fades.

In time, someone will paint over it.
Maybe you. New words. New poems.

Every day you do it. Every day.
Grateful anyone reads. Always surprised.
Still. Still surprised.

There was a time you wanted to be famous.
Not that poets and artists from obscure places
end up on the Tonight Show. You never were
the most realistic crayon out there.
But you had dreams, some of them borrowed.

The odd thing is how many you made happen.
not yours. Yours got lost. Your grafitti painted over
with billboards and a need to be loved.

You broke of course.
It’s what happens when the best of you
is painted over.

And that brokeness was the best thing,
the darkness made you real.
Made you, you. That child you remembered,
gleefully painting mindless color,
capturing what was lost.
Capturing what was found
picking up the scattered words
and re-arranging, a happy puzzle,
and angry puzzle. Everything immediate
or poor history. Feelings. Nothing more.

Graffiti.
You make it.
And walk to the next wall.
Never famous.
And happier for it.
The moment is enough.

A crab leg, disattached and thrown on the beach
by tides and waves, its color still vibrant
as if its dismembering was a recent thing,
an escape perhaps, from the trap
that claimed the rest of the crab, destined
to become someone’s dinner.

But not this leg. It is a remainder, all that is left,
a splash of God’s art on the sand,
temporary as life, just as precious,
flaunting it’s broken beauty for just the briefest moment
between waves,

It was fate that I happened along.
Or perhaps more than fate. Perhaps
I was fated to see it, to capture its image,
fated to make certain its life and its death
were captured, recorded,
its beauty made less fleeting
than traps ever wished for.

Another wave and it is gone.

This is the view from where I sit.

Just to the right of me is the work table,
covered in brushes and paint
and half-finished paintings.
There are things that need to be framed,
and a plethora of pens.

There is no glamour to it.
A working space with good light
and more importantly, time,
set apart, for just this thing,
to get the rest of the world out of my way
and make room for the stuff that comes slowly,

the inspiration, the god-breath
that pulls things out of me no one knew
were there, much less me.

Some artist, me.
I spend far more time staring into space
than applying paint. Thinking you might call it
if you were generous and kind.
It is far less than that,
I am waiting with expectation,
trusting the universe will not leave me empty
for too long.

I have become stronger
in my weakness.

I do not even pretend
to understand.

Some gifts,
you just accept.

Dreams.
Never ordinary.
Surreal landscapes.
Unrecognizable creatures.
Dead people dancing.

Voices.
Always voices.
Voices of the dead.
Of betrayers and lost loves.
Voices of strangers in the night.

Colors.
Impossibly vivid.
Bursts of light in the darkness.
often with music.
Full moon madness every night.

as if your mind rebels in the dark,
unwilling to allow you the peace you dream of
in the day.

Just on the other side, the path disintegrates.
The clear border fences stop
and you are forced to face the chaos
without the clarity of those who have gone before you,

forced to fall back on your ancient teaching
of sunfall and internal compasses,
trusting the lichen on trees and sharp shadows
to lead you, if not to your destination,

at least to safety

You shift in the bed. Light comes through the windows.
There are birds singing outside,
too early for spring, but singing nonetheless.

A full night’s sleep and you are still tired.
Your bones and soul both resist inertia.
The warmth, yours and hers, comingle.

Nearly three years since you exchanged vows.
None of them easy. None of them the stuff of fairy tales.
Times of death and loss and struggle,

Constant chaos.

You prefer peace. That is the truth of it.
it has been a long journey to capture it.
an old man’s journey to rebuild himself from the rubble.

She shifts slightly and settles back into her deep sleep.
You would prefer the fairy tale, but you have lived too long
to believe in them.

In its place is what you have, a different kind of love,
soft as flesh, strong as steel, A thing you wish
you had found as a young man.

But age has its value. Age is a treasure,
Wisdom, however it comes, is treasure. You smile, fully awake,
reaching your arm over the covers

and drawing her closer still.

A duck cuts the water, leaving a thin wake in the quarry.
It is silent. No wind.

You have sat here for a pair of hours, emptying yourself
of questions, of vitriol and doubt, waiting patiently

to see what is left.

It is raining. A January rain come early
on the cusp of a new year. Cold,
but not cold enough for snow.
Everything is mud.

It has not been the year you wished for.
So much ground to a stop, to a broken crawl.
A year dedicated to survival and fighting
of new fears. A lost year.

Children have grown up without you seeing them.
Friends have died, alone. The church lies empty.
There have been no journeys,
too few explorations.

Too much of your time this year has been spent in mourning
and you are tired. Plague, Cancer
and the worst cancer of all, isolation,
have left your mind muddled, and yet….

And yet… it has not been a wasted year.
Around you, you have seen a shift. an appreciation
of true value, of each other, of the precious things that matter
and the things that do not.

You have remained in love.
Your faith has grown stronger as your body has grown weaker.
Your demons are more polite. At times, the battles
turn to afternoon tea and crumpets.

“This too shall pass” has become our mantra,
and it is beginning. You can just see it, the light, the hope.
It is a vague thing. Vague as mud. But it is there,
snippets and shots and whispers.

It is as if we have been asleep, in a bad dream,
and we wake to the same dream, foggy and cold.
Vague. Uncertain.
The ground is slippery.

But it is the cusp of the new year.
The days grow longer. There is change in the air,
sweet as lilac in the night. A thing you cannot see
but you know is there.

And you, tired and worn, are piling the wood.
It is time for a bonfire. For warmth.
To become a beacon, calling the lost home,
including yourself.

The sanctuary is empty, cleared by fear
that has sent us each into our temples
seeking solace and safety.

The holy elements gather dust that shows
in the sun that pours through the stained glass windows.
The ***** is silent.

It is not the only place. Temples are empty.
Mosques are empty. The vast caverns
of the mega churches are empty.

Still, you come. A solitary pilgrim.
You sit in a back pew and pray.

It is hard, praying at such a time.
There is too much, too many, you are overwhelmed
by the vastness of loss and pain and fears.
There are too many to be grateful for,
too many helpers, too many blessings that remain.
You are fine until you begin to pray,
and then suddenly, you feel small.  Overwhelmed.
Your helplessness in the vast world of need
seems infinite.

And so, your prayers lack words,
They are what the bible calls, “a prayer of moaning”.
And that is enough. It has to be. It is all you have to offer.

In the day to day, you are fine.
There are dishes to wash. Poems to write.
The cats need to be fed.
Books to be read.
You can pretend it is normal, until you bend your head
and call on your God.

But then, that is why we pray, is it not?
Because we understand this is beyond us.
It always was, but suddenly our weakness has become real.
We can no longer pretend that we hold the answers,
that we have the strength, that we are enough.

We are not.

Perhaps that is not entirely true.
We are indeed enough.
We are enough to be loved.
We are all we were made to be,
but not all we aspire to be, never content
to be merely human,
we want to be more,
to pretend we are God,
when in the end we are children playing at it,
suddenly overwhelmed and frightened
when things go wrong, looking to our father to save us
when our humanness proves its limits.

You pray in the stained glass light.
There is wind outside and the bones of the church moan with you.
The building creaks, as if God is restless.
When you are done, you leave.
You go back to your home, a different kind of sanctuary now.

The cats greet you at the door.
The woman you love hugs you as you hang your coat.
This is your sanctuary now.
Here you can pray more coherently,
for the neighbors, for the farmers at the edge of town,
for the children next door playing basketball in the afternoon sun.
You feel more sane here. Less overwhelmed,
able to far better accept what you can and cannot be.
There are things you can do here. Now. Small things,
but, as you always say, they add up.

You sip coffee. You make a call. You write a card.
You prepare for the next days work.
God is with you. You believe this.
It allows you to do, when there is not enough of you,
a power beyond your own.

If there is greatness to be had, .
if there is humbleness, this is where it lies,
in knowing what you are and are not,
and living in faith that there is more,
both in the world, and in you,
than you can see,
that your truest sanctuary has no walls
to hold God in,
or let him out.

Sometimes
the biggest step forward
is a step back,

to find the place
you left the path,
following someone else’s journey
instead of your own.

Slow down.
Press forward.
Throw out a few things.
Stand outside in the storms.
Slow down
Be more aware. Of everything.
Look upward more. Look beyond.
Tell fear
to *******.
Throw away a few more things.

Remember
the value of real things,
the cost of false things.
Pet the cats.
Hold your wife
more.
Let the lost things stay lost.
Find new things.
Dance more.
Listen to more music.

Understand
you are enough.

Words matter.
Your mother taught you this
when you were a boy.

She lived it, taught it. It sank in,
a vital part of who and what
you would become.

Words create feelings.
They heal. They wound.
They inspire, inform, sell,

They should be
things of truth.

You think on this on the long drive home.
The GPS has changed its mind once again
and you are on a new road with new thoughts.

It is dark, late at night. Here and there,
lights twinkle. Cabins and houses in the forests.
You can smell the wood smoke.

Yes, it is February. And there is snow
and ice on the road.
You drive, as you generally do, too fast.

But it is warm outside. Over 40.
and the ice melts. You feel it give way
as you press the accelerator around the curve.

It is nearly spring. Oh yes, there will be more snow,
but you are aware of the change.
There is something new in the wind.

You sense, more than see, the bulbs stir.
It is time to change colors,
to let go of the greys and ***** whites

that are so familiar, but not quite true any longer.
You need a new vocabulary, a thing of color and sun,
the truth of you.

You have become too familiar with dark words.
They filled so much of your past
that they had become your mother tongue.

But you do not live there any longer.
To speak the truth, you must learn new words
to tell it.

You have always been bad at languages.
Words came hard. They still do.
You barely passed French in high school, college, grad school.

It is your nemesis.

But when you live in a place, you must learn
the new land’s words. To speak them
as if they were your own.

And so you struggle with this vocabulary of joy,
to tell your truth in words that feel odd
spilling out of your mouth and pen.

You must let go
your mother tongue.
The truth insists on it.

There are new paintings to create,
bright things, the colors of childhood,
a reclaiming of innocence,

and it awaits you at the end of the road,
in the place where your love lives.
You press the pedal.

The car moves faster through the night.

A black man dies on a city street,
the policeman’s knee on his neck,
breath, life taken from him.

There are riots. Of course there are.
A people ignored too long will erupt sooner or later.
A people not heard too long with erupt sooner or later.

This is a truth we ignore,
an ugly truth.
A universal truth we should understand

from our holy books
and the history repeating itself
again and again and again.

People are made to be loved and cared for,
and when we are not, we either die, or erupt.
too often both.

We know this from our holy books.
We preach it from our pulpits.
and yet we are content to ignore it,

avoiding discomfort, a bit here and there.
avoiding conversation, and listening,
hoping somehow we can deny the truth of neglect.

But the poets and the prophets agree with history.
We can continue it ignore them only so long
before the roof falls in.

There is perhaps,
a little guilt,
that in the midst of the plague year,
my heart still beats fastest
when you are near.

Dust on the Clocks

Three clocks stand on the mantle.
Four generations of time keepers
stand still.

The mantle clock with it’s graceful wooden arch
reminiscent of cathedrals, complete
with hand painted dial and brass pendulum
belonged to your great grandparents,
one of two things in your home
that came from the plantation they once owned
before the civil war swept through
and began their long, slow decline.
It chimed the hour when you were growing up,
it’s strand spring driven mechanism
sonorous when it rang, and yet somehow
almost tinny.

There is another, from your grandfather’s house.
Faux marble, a bit too bright and gaudy for it’s time,
a tiny arched gravestone, you wind it
and the clock ticks annoyingly, steadily,
never quite keeping perfect time.
According to your grandfather, it never did,
It came from a world’s fair, he once told you,
one of only a couple trips he made
that took him far from his little farm villiage,
His wanderlust never quite fit in there,
and though rarely fed, it was a memory worth having
despite the clock’s being terrible at its job.

The last clock is small. A tilted block. More recent.
A gift you brought back to your parents
from your first trip overseas. A thank you
for feeding your own wanderlust early,
of making you a traveler and wanderer,
willing to be uncomfortable in another’s world for a time
in exchange for the growth each journey brings.
It sat on the desk in their den
until the day the last of them died,
before coming back to you, this small reminder
silent with its electric motor. Almost invisible
except for the mark it left on your soul.

The clocks have dust on them.
You are not the best housekeeper
and time means less to you now than it once did.
Painfully you have learned the lesson
of deadlines and plans destroyed again and again.
There is only now. Here. This moment.
The rest is illusion. A beautiful construction,
artful as the clocks. Full of memories.
Full of promise. And nothing more.

Small Adventures

The bridge is rickey, a floating bridge
over a woodland pond. Rarely traveled,
it floods in the spring,
making the passage if not dangerous,
at least a little messy, a place avoided by most.

There is no obvious view, no reason
to cross the bridge in the wet season.
Nothing draws you except curiosity.

For you, that is enough,
rarely content to wonder,
you have a desire to see,
no matter how messy,
where the journey takes you.

This tendency has not always served you well.
At times, there is nothing worth the journey
on the other side
and you are left wet and worn with nothing to show
but the adventure and stories to tell your children,
reminding them you too still have
some of the wildness of youth buried in your old bones.

You are a collector of mistakes,
some of them unavoidable, some of them not your own,
some of them spectacular.
Most barely noticed. Part of the journey,
to collect them like brim on a line,
then let them go at the end of the day.

You cross the shakey bridge. Your feet grow wet.
On the other side is a clearing of rocks and boulders.
You clamber up in the April sun
and take off your shoes and socks
and lie on the sun while they dry.
You will take a new path home, a dry one,
a safe, if somewhat longer one.

But this small adventure has been a success.
For all its mess, there is healing in the sun
that bakes you and the rocks you lie on,
and if the wet path was a mistake,
it is one you would gladly make again.

Early in the morning, I breathe you in.
The energy of your skin fills me.
And I wake before I wake,
Every nerve awake,
my once dead heart beating,
wild and alive.

A single door in the brick building.
A host of windows to let in light.
A place to live and worship and work,
all three, your soul built in red clay, wood and glass.

A place to look out. To see the light,
the green of gardens, the crowds at a distance.
birds, at least until winter,
to revel in the sun, the heat of it

without going out.

A place for others to peer in,
curious wanderers, strangers,
the invited and uninvited,
It is the price and privilege of so much glass

that they can see you in sacred times
and the profane, that layer by layer
your secrets are revealed,
your scars and sins as bright as the curtains that waft in the wind.

A place to prepare. To see what is out there,
The ugly and the beautiful, A place to pretend
you can choose which to live among.
You cannot.

It is all real, and with you or without you,
the things beyond your doors will go one.
You can stay, here behind you thick walls,
or go out and plant, choose what you will get to eat

at the end of the season.

He sits on the small stage,
Long hair and mustaches,
costumed and dressed in his Renaissance finery.

Three women sit off to one side.
Madrigal singers, waiting
for his perfect rhythm, his perfect low notes
to begin.

Four strings.
Nothing more.
Four strings
and infinite possibilities.

As a boy, you waited by the tracks,
often for hours in a hot summer’s day.
Sweat bees hovered around you,
their tiny stings keeping you awake as you waited.

Hours sometimes. Half a day.
You waited, never knowing the schedule, but sure
the train would come, eventually.

You heard it before you saw it.
A low rumbling in the ground beneath you,
until finally, it came,
the blunt engines, dark and menacing
and then the long chain of cars.

Coal cars, each one piled high with black stone,
shining in the sun, fresh hewn from the West Virginia mines.
Here and there, a few chunks fall,
enough to build a fire in the night.

But not now. For now, you sit,
the earth rumbling beneath you,
the steady click-clack of the wheels,
watching the occasional spark of steel against steel,
waiting, waiting for that last car,

the caboose, red with its windows dark.
No evidence of life, but you knew; you always knew
someone was there,
someone, not you, not yet, but someone,
was traveling around the bend,
far from your little boy’s world,
and part of you traveled with him,

A yearning that has never left you.
Wanderlust, that bit of a boy that still lives
in this gray-haired shell, waiting at the crossing
as the train passes by,
more than patient,
you smile, remembering not who you were,
but who you are.

It snowed again last night, just enough
to cover the ground, not enough
to slow life in any way. You drove right through it,

past the fields and barns, past the forests
with limbs lined with white. Feathers falling.

It is more than a post card. These are working farms.
Cows are being fed and milked.
Steam rises from piles of manure.
Goats too, are milked, Cheese is being made.
Early mornings and late nights. The work continues
no matter the weather.

Here, life is defined by seasons. By weather.
Sun and rain and snow and drought have meaning
beyond the soft contours of the ground,
beyond colors or the lack of colors.

You did not know it, but you needed that reminder,
that return to your summer roots, summers spent
on your grandfather’s farm, feeding pigs
and hoeing peanuts with black men who sang hymns.
My grandfather and I sang along.

In the heat of the day, we would all disperse.
He and I would go to the mill pond deep in the woods
and fish. He used bait. I did not.
It was the being there that mattered.

I spent my lifetime working in cities,
It was a good life and it was part of what has formed me.
but distance and time have a cost. Things get lost.
I had no idea what coming here, to Nowhere, Vermont,
would do to restore my connection to the dirt
that birthed us all.

The ball rolls, bounces and spins.
The crowd holds its breath,
anticipating, against the odds,
their magic number.

It stops. Money, in small plastic chits,
designed to lessen the loss,
changes hands.
And it begins again.

The wild card. The odd number,
the stacked odds when you play with fate,
all for the thrill, your mind lost
to passion and hope and the excitement

of beating the odds.

I do not gamble. I have lost enough
to set myself up for loss yet again.
There is no thrill in the game.
I have been drained of hope and pretense

that the fates favor me.
Better to run under their radar,
to deprive them of the chance to crush my hopes
and leave me broken.

I have become a student of the old ways.
Simple. True. Faithful.
I need less now than then, and with that less,
I have more to lose.

Leave others to play. They believe
in their place in the pantheon of gods and fates.
You watch, wondering how long they can lose
and still believe.

It’s not very pretty, this old fishing boat.
Paint is peeled and the brass is pitted.
There is rust on the anchor
and the porthole glass is glazed with salt.

But each day it leaves the harbor
and finds its way to deep waters.
Nets are dropped and fish are caught.
And each night it returns.

The first flowers begin at the bottom,
New shoots of forsythia,
almost out of sight unless you look close.

The promise of spring
lies always near the roots.

“Put it out there.” she said,
that first therapist, the one who saw you
at your blackest, every sin and flaw
laid out to this perfect stranger in some blind faith,
or more truthfully,
in your desperate need for confession.

You learned the hard way the corrosion
of pretending perfection. It’s corrosion
on you and all you touched. But the whole idea
of peeling the layers off, one by one, in public,
when you could barely admit your boils and brokenness yourself
seemed a whole new kind of madness
before you had cured the first kind.

“Put it out there.” she said.
“You are a creature of discipline,
and you feel a responsibility, even if only one or two reads
to continue writing.
The bloodletting will be your cure
and to do it in the market square
will help your healing. Trust me.”

I didn’t of course. Trust that is.
I was far from a place where I could trust anyone,
but too, I was desperate,
and so I began that slow strip tease
I continue today,

unwrapping layer after layer where anyone can watch,
never knowing where to stop exactly,
when enough is enough and when perhaps
I have moved to something too close to the flesh
where I will burn for my perfidy of truth telling
and when I do not strip enough away that no one cares.
It’s a strange game, poetry as therapy,
poetry as strip teases, but who knew,
fifteen years later,
that there were still layers left

It is a strange kind of spring,
autumn leaves, the stragglers and survivors
that clung to the white-clad birches all winter,
have let loose, their yellow leaves a carpet
covering the April grass and its greening.

Typical of New England, there is no continuity of weather.
One day the sun warms your skin like a lover’s touch,
and next day is cold and snowy, cutting like betrayal.

It is a season of plague and quarantine,
a cruel joke, making us all prisoners of fear,
like birch leaves, hanging on, clinging
until the season changes.

I am not a worrier.
I was cured of worry, I believed, a decade and a half ago,
surviving more than I believed I could then,
nothing now seems as consequential.
but I worry now.

I worry for the children,
mine and the ones that surround me.
I worry for the doctors and nurses,
for the people who stock my stores at night,
for the myriad of people I know
who have built their livelihoods,
suddenly fragile, unexpected deaths to the plague.
I worry for the poor. I know too many of them
for them to be an abstraction. No care, no money,
what little life they have crumbles.
I worry about the loud ones, the deniers
and all they touch, proud carriers of disease.
What will become of them?
I worry for the elderly, huddled, too often
already victims of loneliness,
a new vulnerability suddenly added to the frailness of age.
I worry about…. the list is too long.
I pray, but the list is too long, too easy
to leave someone loved out,
until at last I cry out to God in a great groan
that says more than my words,
and I lean into him, knowing he knows,
more than I, the loss and fear and need
for comfort and strength beyond what I have.

I walk across the yellow leaves of spring.
Freshly stripped off the trees in yesterday’s rain,
they are supple and a thing of beauty.
But this will not last. In a few days they will dry
and turn brown, and fall to dust beneath my feet,
no longer survivors, but victims and all that is left to me
is prayer and the power to remember their beauty
and share it, long after they are gone

Early March in Vermont, and for a week now
the snow has slowly melted into the landscape.
The sap runs from the maples to the sugar houses.

It is easy to believe winter is done,
releasing its grip, softening the earth
with its promise of greening.

But I lived long enough to know winter
does not surrender so easily. It will come again
and hold the season hostage with ice and new snow.

And we will complain. We will whine.
Somehow forgetting this happens each year
and that spring comes in fits and starts

and false springs may bring more grey weather
and white, icy landscapes, but they too will pass,
for each false spring is a harbinger of the inevitable.

Build me a house with many windows.
A house with many doors
to let the air waft through on an autumn morning,
to let the light in, to let me see the world outside.

Do not hang any curtains.
Set the furniture looking out.
and if strangers look in, fine.
They will see what they will see,
what is there, not all of it Better Homes and Gardens.

I am done hiding in the dark. It does not suit me.
I am too old for such foolishness.
Too old for hide and seek.
So build me a house. A new house.
A place bright and open.
Let the dusty corners show.
Let the leftover coffee linger on the kitchen table.
Breathe in the air like a monk
learning to dance.

You sip your coffee.
You take a bite of the sausage gravy, thick and salty.

The music playing in the diner is strange.
If music could be danish modern, this would be it,
streamlines and bleached, oddly pure,
in a language you cannot understand and yet somehow, do.

In a flash you are young and old,
moments of the journey like a roller coaster,
a madman’s collage with tunes.

And the words. Like a bad flashback scene, they come,
a B movie, or worse, lurid and darkly humorous,
other people’s words, each one a memory and a trigger,
leading to another and yet another.

Were I not so vibrant, it would be an end of life montage,
and you sit sipping, taking it all in, aware that no matter what happens
from here on out, you have survived the wreckages,
landing like a cat thrown out the window
so often you almost laugh when you fly,
knowing somehow, your feet are awaiting you below.

Life has become closer, more precious,
bound by walls and doors and masks
and an unfamiliar fear.

This is not who you are.
But it is, right now.
Something weaker than you want to admit,
far more vulnerable,
your breathing labored and wheezy,
unsure. Each moment, each breath
both work and a celebration.

You remember your father like this,
his smoke ravaged lungs straining each breath
for the last years of his life,
no medicine,
no mechanics able to do more than making the next possible.
I watched the wearing away,
of body and mind, and will.

This will pass. Already the medicines are at work.
Already your wheeze has died down to a whisper.
You will heal. Doors will open.
Horizons will return,
and you will walk them, staring into the dusky sky
unafraid of death,
thankful you have been spared for a time,
the gratitude itself a kind of horizon,
a way of seeing past your vulnerability,
finding again the horizons once lost,
and finally, reclaiming each and every one.

Here in Vermont, the winters are cold,
sometimes brutal, never gentle,
a teasing sort of punishment for those of us who stay.

And so it is at the end of April, snow is blowing
and there is a sheen of ice across the quarry
and you find yourself indoors in what should be a season of sun.

There is no normal here. That is what you discovered.
Behind the bucolic scenery and towns postcarded
like 1955, every ill lives here that lives in the cities you left behind,

hidden behind prettier backdrops perhaps,
but we are excused nothing for the privilege of living
in a land without billboards.

That is not a complaint. I love it here,
and since we all suffer in this life. (It is sure as seasons.)
better to choose your place of pain.

The snow falls. The sun shines. It is cold again.
No matter. You have fresh flowers on the window.
Coffee brews. You are in a good place in a bad time.

Who could wish for more?

This too shall pass. So says the bible.
Only it never did. We did, and we believe it so fervently
we gave it biblical status,

proving at that at times we can uncover
wisdom on our own, and so, give our suffering
meaning.

The boat is tied neatly against the pier.
The teak gleams but you can see the wear,
the marks of decades of use.

The things that make it able
have been maintained. You can see that.
The hull lacks barnacles. The ropes are fresh

and if the cleats show pits of oxidation,
they are small. Nothing has been allowed
to weather far. It is a craft ready,

made for travel, to ride wind and wave
using no more than its own strength
and the wisdom of its sailor

to trim the sails just so, always adjusting
to the fickle shifts of the ocean.
A survivor, never allowing neglect

to stand in the way of journey.
Even now, in this strange season,
docked too long to the wooden pier,

its whole purpose, whole meaning,
put on hold by fate and laws,
there is work to be done.

For the West wind always returns. Always.
There will be new horizons and the secret
to meeting the new necessities the West wind brings

is to do the work, not of maintenance,
but preparation.

It tilts. It moves.
The floor falls out underneath you.
The rules change. The light shifts and flickers.
Somewhere, someone is laughing
maniacally.
Somewhere, too often, someone is crying.
Faces leap out at you,
implacable and unfeeling,
somehow worse than
the monsters we were taught to fear,
blind to blood.
There is music. Here and there a note rings
false, as if the music itself is a lie.
In the distance, where the light lives,
there is another song,
a weeping anthem of hope and revolution.
You were not prepared to be so unsettled,
so unsure which way your safety lies.
A scream fills the air. Not a shriek to scare,
but of pain. Somewhere in the dark.
There is no one to lead you. Each ghoul
beckons you in dark corners,
sinister in their suits. Blood on their cuffs.
In the end, you fall back on your faith.
John calls you in a faint whisper.
“Forward.”  Always forward.
Through the darkness, toward the light.
Leave the ghouls behind to whither
in their own darkness.
You will not allow it to be yours.

You sit down with your coffee.
The short order cook is busy at the grill.
Things you cannot see sizzle.

There is music here. There is always musc here.
Eclectic and sometimes strange, rarely
what you would think of as morning music,
quirky and boppy with a bass beat you feel,
one of the benefits of a place run by musicians
instead of accountants.

The coffee is good. Rich. Almost, but not quite harsh.
Alive. A tonic for the past night’s dreams.
They were joyous things, your dreams,
full of blue skies and Abba,
interiours out of Architectural Digest,
beautiful and simple and white.
But always interrupted by betrayal.
You would wake, and insist on sleeping again,
hoping for a different ending that never bore fruit.

Better to wake. Better to shake off the lies of the night,
a power that rises only when you wake,
and like a soldier before battle, prepare yourself
for what is real.

No one in town can tell you
exactly when they closed the plant,
but it was a generation ago.

Young generations, with children of their own
cannot recall it anything but what it is today:
an empty ghost of a building,

a place their parents speak of,
once bustling, now habited
by the occasional homeless soul

until they too, are chased away.
The canal runs past,
shallow water running fast

for no purpose.
An indelible, empty landmark.
It draws you, a grim reminder

of your own empty past,
of dark windows and broken things
and memories of purpose lost.

You go in.
It is dark and dusty inside. Cobwebs abound.
Most everything salvageable has been pillaged

or spray-painted with graffiti,
messages from the lost boys who never knew
this place as it was.

There is a strange art to it.
Half history, half a storage hall
for ancient dreams and promises.

You linger in wonderment,
that such enterprise could be made worthless
by the scratch of an accountant’s pen,

and just like that, becomes a mausoleum.
A holder of dead hopes.
It is at times, too close to the bone. Except

for this one thing:
Yours is a tale of resurrection,
and when you are done with your explorations.

you will walk again
in the sun.
Hopes intact and shining.

This is what you do.
You mourn.
And mourn more.
For as long as you need to be lost in it.
There is no timetable to mourning.

You do not.
Can not.
Will not
lose the loss.
That is not how it works.

You live it
and in time,
when you are ready,
and not one minute earlier,
you find room for something else.

Something small.
But something nonetheless.
And you let it in.
And then something else.
and yet another.

You decide.
When.

You learn. That’s the thing in it all.
you learn that it never fades, the mourning.
It will always be there, just behind the eyes.
Always.

But you learn there is more to you.
Room for more.
That hearts are far larger than the cavity that holds them.
Hearts are where eternity lives.
They are infinite.
But only
when we are ready;
for mourning has no time.