I finished reading your book
and now know its all been written
Plath and her marriage
Oliver’s wild geese
Shakespeare’s folly
Whitman and his grass
Chaucer’s bawds
But this I know
that I woke one morning
and knew my life was charmed
and when that door opened
I walked thru it
into a Child’s Garden of Verse
life is long
and its sonnets are evergreen
folding hands into origami of thankfulness and praise
tattered cloth lifts in spring breezes masked
by the long solitary path of twelve calendar pages crowded
by every woman and man, pursuing
a future once certain, then not, now, hopeful
greening again in the eyes of every child
they’re not the cottonwoods
or live oaks from my childhood
climbing trees and leafy hideaways
where library books
and pb&js were squirreled away
on long summer days
no they are trees unfamiliar to me
standing watch over my doorway
in the last home of my life
where I will spend long summer days
with books and pb&js
squirreled away in their shade
some days open like honeycomb
dripping with the sweetness of mercy
and filled with the grace of a thousand summer skies
remember you are filled with light
and the heart of your heart
is strong
Even though I no longer like the cold weather, for some reason my body is missing the frigid walks along the waters edge. The north wind slicing through layers and layers of sweaters and scarves and jackets like a very cold butter knife. And I seem to be expecting the fog to settle in and gray skies to be all I see except here, its sunny and not cold but dont get me wrong its not warm.
Its the blue skies so far that have me stunned in a good way because that fog would get in my mind and cover my eyes and my mouth until I was suffocated in its grieving heartless grayness.
I can live with not cold but not warm and the blue sky can visit my morning window all it wants cause this might be the last place I live and I will gladly die here in the blue skyness of it all.
It all started with a phone call from Kansas City, of all places and with it came a great wind. Not a derecho like the one in Cedar Rapids, of all places, that blew all the trees down and left my poor friend’s garden a wreck.
Nope, it was a great wind blowing east and even though it was a call from Kansas City, of all places, I’m not Dorothy and I didn’t end up in Oz even though I have a small dog that kinda looks like ToTo. No, not Oz but North Carolina, of all places.
It blew me from a house that I lived in for twenty years and though it was a nice house and all and it never gave me a minutes worry and it was surrounded by heron wings and bluebirds and a thousand hummingbirds who about ate me out of house and home and that is just an expression, anyway, I never gave my heart to that perfectly nice home.
Instead, this wind from the west blowing east that all started with that phone call from Kansas City, of all places. It blew me to a little cottage that appeared in my dreams and was mine in a former life if I believed in that sort of thing but maybe I do ’cause I love this house like a mother loves a child or maybe more like a dear old friend that you haven’t seen in years and years and you run into unexpectedly on the street, of all places, and you cry and hug and kiss until you are so filled with gladness that you are satiated with just so much love.
And its all because of that phone call. From Kansas City, of all places, that I am in this magical little cottage in North Carolina, of all places. And
You never know when you pick up that phone
what wind might blow.
\
