Posts for June 4, 2021 (page 9)

We visit the springs in the Bluegrass state.
The weeks dwindle til I move out east
to live with you. We greet eastern Columbine
and walk onto the paths while the trees
bathe us. All I know is I know you now.
The cadence of our voices leaves
me gratefully misplaced.

After the first switchback, my hand in yours,
the bark and light and vines inspire
my thought-before-speech confession: This
reminds me of Kentucky.

Nothing’s been quite here before.
Only the turtles who surface for air.

You stay the week and before you leave
I’ve seen cicada for the first time. I begin
to propagate two jade plants. Lucky
rescues– because I didn’t know before that I
was meant to prune them.

why do you harbor anger
and expect me
to break the silence

when

someone else’s name
tumbled from your lips
freefalling to my ears
shattering an unspoken intimacy
in the pre-dawn hours

and left me

speechless

Open the box

Inside, blue cotton pieces from you.

I wrap myself around stitches and inhale to breathe you in.

Straight to my heart and curled up in my guts.

You rest there until I take another breath.

Deep. To my toes. I see your eyes as I exhale.

Mingled now with the air.

I dare not hold it long or it will fade.

A time for reminiscing at the bar
saw a group of friends recounting memories of
another friend who had died by suicide.
He gave so much of himself, one guy told,
that he accidentally gave himself away,
and that hit me like a fucking freight train.

Because isn’t that how those practiced in compassion live,
toeing that too-far-gone line like a car running on fumes?
I think of all the celebrities who have met this tragic end,
the Chester Benningtons and Chris Cornells,
Robin Williams and so many nameless angels on earth
who lost their final fight with the darkness.

I think of myself and the compliments I receive,
not out of the pride of calling myself a similar angel
but I have chosen, or was chosen by, a life that rides along that line.
I’ve searched for it to keep an eye on it, to recognize it
if I ever find that I’ve started to stray beyond it,
all in an effort to share the most love I can with the world.

Like biological half life,
truth has many variables.
Metabolic rates matter.
How the story is told
determines when effects will hit.
How it is received.

Liver is the right hand man.
Detoxifies in small increments.
Can be prone to anger, if over burdened.

Yes, it matters how the story is told.
It’s all a story.
Word choice with a full glass of water
every six hours.

Cold turkey truth,
and there will be discomfort.
Often feels so alive,
it is akin to death.

Process to a stable level
to feel truth sweet.

like that afternoon
at the ski slopes
in that crowded cafeteria
wet mittens and discarded toboggans everywhere
sore legs
and the burn of cold air in my lungs

hot ham and cheese
on a buttered bun
wrapped in tin foil
fuel for the next ride up the gondola
and my fourteenth fall
on my butt in the snow  

on that mountain
somewhere in Indiana
covered white
by man-made machines
to look like Sweden
or the Alps or some other place for skiing

that probably wouldn’t serve
hot ham and cheese
or  put up with some beginner
at something new for a change
enjoying every minute
every memory in this sandwich. 

These are the implications of fiction;
an afternoon when I had cut a
budding branch off of that sensual arc
of magnolia, a dual trunk circumventing
the building’s image, self-obscuring
plurality of bruised lotus.  

It would have stood, alien,
in the emptied garbanzo can, how strange is it
to see a long legged foal
still as granite, solitary—
an uncanny beast,
a corporeal chain?
This is the branch’s flowered body, starkly unwelcomed
by its hollow tin vessel.  

Or (and this is stranger still),
the serration blooming on my dresser
would have bled
into a surrounding collage
of objects.
My books, letters perpetuated from some
unknown and archaic source.
The words between covers,
distributed once-privacies or jottings
of a unique portraiture. (It belongs to us now.)
The wood of my desk and of the
floor, a strange meeting of
amputations.  

My room is a resurrection
of limbs.
Tree-scene out the window— light penetrating petals
as they fall gently,
skeins of sun yearning for return
to an origin,
to a sort of mercuric unity.
To the circular lake, I suppose, then,
that lies in the earth’s pit.
A mirrored pupil.
The silence of the liquid iris.

Undulating path
Obstacle inspiration
Propel us forward
Threading always to our goal
Unknown and misunderstood

As long as I can remember water,
its fluid sound was music,
the ocean waves to a child
lull the mind to rest. In nature
my comfort is the trees
and every stone is art.

With canvas and paint art
seeks to capture the color of water,
the secret voice of trees,
that resonate a deep music
only venturesome nature
lovers hear, or a curious child.

When I was a child
the firmament was art
framed by nature
and all around flowing water
lilted and lapped composing music,
harmonizing with wind in the trees.

Under the shade of trees
a sundappled child,
I listened and explored the music,
a theme for my art,
my legs knee deep in water
in my world of nature.

The wildness and textures of nature
shadowed by the trees,
dissected by gurgling water,
stones and mud, toys to a child.
The forest is the canvas for art
the water, a symphony of liquid music.

Now in my dream music
I find solace in nature.
The forest, the ocean, my preferred art.
Shelter is a canopy of trees.
I travel back to time as a child
finding peaceful voices in the water.

It is from the experience of water music,
the trees are my safety and art
while I live as a child of nature.

by Kelly Waterbury