Monday, August 10, 2015

Redoux

It's hard,
Really hard to keep 
This train on the track.
Some days I don't do well at all
Trying to do this,
And if I give in
To reality,
I'd have to quit trying.

So I live on this 
Restless line,
Hope,
Praise singing from
Some sweet ordinary sky,
The bits of dust kicking 
Up on our country road
Suggesting possibility to reclaim
A spot on this wildly and not understood spinning globe.

If only the black flies 
Would cease
The space outside
At near-perfect dusk
Could seduce me into
Thinking 
I've been so wrong,
Maybe right at other times,
But nonetheless this insight 
Shakes me with this 
Psychic throttle: 
Woman, don't give
Up, and if you do, 
Make a fiction of it and don't forget to
Weave in the thank you bits. 

Meanwhile, hello 
Lovelies, you old lilies blooming now, I see 
You wait in perfect splendor
With some rhythm I'll never
Know, 
Magnificent in the splendid
Diffidence to these strange 
And crippling fights
These ferocious struggles
We think are life and death.

No, life 
Is fulsome in this outside refectory, this holy constant solace, 
And I missed this space, these 
Past few weeks of ancient growing glory 
Probably because of my own self, my failure to always 
keep
Ithaka in mind.

Now gratitude rises to 
Meet the road
Where someone wends his truck to far off home down into the next section;
The neighbors' kids shout their coming in; 
I hear them faint in my
Primordial settling of all this stuff,
And there is
Bird song mixed into
Twilight. 
 
Across the forest, 
Placid Seneca
Floats, miasma
Under still haze
Indifferent as I 
Fret and fuss into
This new stuff, determined 
To live my place, 
Be nourished.

Who will know if 
I quail in resolve
And vision? 
I listen to myself, the 
Answers I have 
Just guesses.
It doesn't matter if I
Succeed or fail. 
Main thing is, I say, I tried.