The Hardest Wait

I am waiting for the last turn of the year
to bend its way into a cold corner & relent.
For the stacks of to do & to buy to be done.
For the messages to go ignored & the smiles
to settle: a body sinking into warm bed heaven.
I will trade this corner for the corner of a couch.
I will trade the daily driver's seat for an 800
mile holiday triangle: home, away from home,
old home, & back again.

                                     But you will be waiting,
won't you? Like the books, unread for time,
the stacks of half-ass scholarship & unlooked
lesson plans. An unlocked door between us and
nothing but a rising & setting sun holding time
from tearing itself apart.

                                     But the windows will
not fail. Not these that share a morning moon,
the lost seabirds circling, the semiotics of wind.
I will gladly trade them for a windshield view:
the sly Missouri bending near Rocheport,
the sad, dead paddle-wheels seen from a steel-
bridge view above the stubborn Mississippi,
the snow-stubbled fields of southeast Kansas.

There is no mistaking the way we slide through
time collecting familiarities. Though everything
changes, the way we see & the way we wait
remain. The rest is the stacking of goods.