Anecdotal

alone for an hour,

a strange-warm

winter Sunday,

a handsaw &

headphones,

we made a

renegade

tree disappear,

but the sapling

trunks, five in all,

at the place they

were the thickest

remain undug,

another day’s

tool & time.

…

together an hour

winding through

grocery aisles,

we two & the

wee one gather

future meals

brave  the hectic

crowds, borrowing

time from tears

that  (lucky us)

never come:

we fill a cart

with food,

with plans,

pay the tab,

load for

the unload

& put away.

…

shipping the troops

outside for an hour

a snowless deployment

rare in January:

left to their own

devices: grey sidewalks

graffito’d a winter blue,

a hill race on foot,

red bike turns,

brotherly taunts,

wrestles & rolls

in the brown

& sleep-full grass.

…

this is what it means to share an imagination:

the imagery of possibility: of unwarped cubits,

the momentary escape into the lion’s roar of labor:

throb of forearm, the aching cramp within the glove,

the shared but dreaded rituals of domestic life

turned magically into a game of hide & seek,

the pride of witnessing the brotherly bond

exult in its freedom to create & to break down:

to know that what grows must change,
that change creates loss as it provides gain,

to learn the patience of long love,

through the slow victimage of growing old

but most of all, learning the easiest lessons last:

that the anecdotes of memory are all we carry through,

that nothing remains but what is loved well,

that innocence is possible when the right task meets the right moment:

nothing teaches virtue better than the story that can’t be told,

the story that gives & gives & knows no proper way to end.

Departure

"My friends stood in a line and waved good-bye as long as they could see my back." [Basho, The Narrow Road]

Maybe it is loss that breeds
a need for absence, a going
that suggests distance & time,
when so many days end in a slipping away.

If I can imagine a line of friends,
loved ones, the marginally close
lining up to bid farewell, do not
mistake it for a death wish,
or a longing for the inevitable rise & fall of disease,
but a silent need for an appreciation
only recognizable through sustained longing.

Maybe not longing exactly, but being missed,
having the shared space emptied,
not breaking the vessel, always fragile,
just on the brink of disrepair,
but leaving behind footprints & a bit of dust,
knowing that I'd come back,
if only for the clutter, but not soon,
not too soon.

A decade is a considerable time to live in the same somewhere:
to occupy a house, to work a room, to wander a hallway.
Though dreams arise, fall, & reemerge, a made place must change or be left behind.

There is a second image lingering somewhere behind these lines,
the portentous one that tries so hard sometimes to become fact:
a family gathering their most precious cargo, strapping down what they love &

heading down some road that promises a fulfillment that their going toward brings.