Vacated

I’ve forgotten yesterday by the time today approaches.  The past is a dream I can no longer access—an afterthought, insubstantial—something I once acquired and then quickly lost.

But my hands remain busy, continually shuffling the cards. Each time I turn them over I see nothing–both sides are empty.  No surprise.  They have been empty for a long time now. 

The hours chase me unguided through tunnels of almost and maybe, seizing and destoying probably until it’s anyone’s guess.  My mind has become an imperfect mixture of what I can’t recall and what I don’t want to remember.

The wind tells me stories, invites me to become a passenger inside its song, cut loose from any need to reconstruct the places I have been, the ones that once contained my life.  I am weightless, free.  In the tender gray I swim undisturbed.

The prosery prompt at dVerse, chosen by Lisa, is from Celia Dropkin’s “In Sullivan County”.

In the tender gray,
I swim undisturbed.

I’ve also used Jane’s Oracle 2 words as inspiration.

36 thoughts on “Vacated”

  1. Kerfe, what a perfect image to use. Like there is but one brick left to block the past away, not necessarily gone but soon to be inaccessible. What’s back there is not much more than a muddled, jumbled-up mess. I feel the eye is looking at the past and am woeful that that’s the side of the wall we are on 😦 The tender grey is so inviting here.

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  6. Beautiful and haunting. The line “My mind has become an imperfect mixture of what I can’t recall and what I don’t want to remember” is perhaps the most perfect description of Alzheimer’s Disease… A topic that has been in my thought lately since my sister’s MIL is living with them and deteriorating from that dreadful condition…

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    1. Thanks Muri. Both my mother and her sister suffered from Alzheimer’s for many years, so I am hyperaware of its implications. And of course it’s always a worry in the back of my mind. My memory has always been terrible so I’m not sure if I would be able to tell when it arrived though…(K)

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  7. It’s odd that the tone of this poem is so uncertain, with the images of buffeting wind whispering indistinctly, the cards that show no future, the memories that refuse to form a comforting wall, when the line of poetry is so calm and unruffled. Maybe it was the influence of the random words. The tone is similar to what they gave me.
    The illustration is perfect. Imprecise, big blanks, but with dark smudges that could be ominous.

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    1. I went right away to the word gray (although my preference is to spell it grey, I resisted…) The fact that it appeared both in the prompt and in your words made me feel they should be used together. Grey is always undefined for me.

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      1. I can’t use US spelling. It just looks wrong to me. Not how I was taught, so I changed it to grey.
        Grey is a vague zone, a ‘grey’ area, but it’s also the colour of feathers and animal fur. It’s a warm colour usually but I agree, it’s hard to grasp. How a feather is different gradations of grey, and animal fur is dozens of different shades.

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        1. I always see colors in feathers or fur as overlaid with many other colors, so it’s more of a grey cast with a lot of other aspects to it. Most colors in nature are like that.

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  10. OK, I’m confused. There’s lots to say, but I’ll only say a little bit. Near surgical the relationships here – words to story to meaning, and the muted but ever-present color. I scare will admit I understand more of this than I’ll say. Your words go to the bones.

    And I read the ‘rules’ but must say this reads and sounds and breathes just like a poem does. Not a failing from the prompt, but a better realization I think. So, poem or not, yes it is. (a poem doesn’t need to wear a poem-suit to be a poem. it is or isn’t by its nature expressed.) Actually I like both scissors and glue when applied to poem ideas.

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    1. Thanks for your insight Neil. I too feel it too closely for comfort sometimes.
      And I also agree–I don’t every really write prose. It’s always a prose poem in the end.

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