Wrestling

 Last night I dreamed

I lost my cellphone and my passport

And then, oh

I found after some

Ultimately futile 

Contemplating

About what to do

That alas,

I’d also lost my driver’s license

And the billfold in which I carried it

And 800 dollars, and 

But, and  

Where, I woke to ask

Was I going?

In my dream, 

After I knew I’d lost my passport

And my cell, 

I was frantic:

Dad! Oh how can I even find you?

So I started

(In my dream) 

To look through the cupboards

In my grandmother’s pantry

And just when I despaired,

I found I’d tucked my 

Carryall,

My pocketbook—

The grey bag with lots of pockets—

Tucked it 

Into the cupboard where

The china was, 

That she wanted me to have

I found it

And so I woke to ask

Who am I? 

Way it Is

Winter

Pondering if it is a truth, that I’m kind of isolated and getting to be an old woman up here, trying to make a difference, juggling integrity, weariness, love and all that bit. I sit looking out of my nighttime windows, and it’s the strangest outside I’ve seen in some time. The north is still snow-covered, though mud is everywhere the rest.

I realize I’m becoming used to green winter, though it does feel random still, and in my recall I think on snow pinwheels in May, early snow before Halloween one year, powdering an icy sprinkle. Seems a little frivolous, a frivolity I may need to think on a bit more. 

It is 1-9-24

I wrote a poem a long time ago about green winter. I’ve been thinking about it for many moons. And ten years ago I sat to look into this kind of winter sky, wrapped as now into what just is, and later, in the shift in my interior wandering, I started to muse on my last quarter, and wrote about that too. 

The arctic, though, in that poem I wrote maybe ten years ago, shivers now, still, and dissipates into another kind of moment, deepening into a whole again. There is breath and life in an arctic, and I breathe anew that breath. Part of me has to wonder if it’s about this last, a past, in the beautiful warp of time. Perhaps we take our leavings on a wild, wondrous cold slide navigating worlds, cosmos, and so forth, and so I ponder.

I didn’t take my hearing aids out tonight. I usually do. Oh wind-whipping beauty, oh the life pattering on my metal roof: rain? Sleet? Hail? Small messages from restive clouds, portending snow? I don’t know, and I could be afraid, and maybe I should. But I’m not, really. As I write, I think hmm. Derecho. 

1-13-24