Twice each year the absence digs a deeper hole. The day of your birth. The day of your death. What I should have said. What I should have done, but did not.
But time has other sides. Ends also have beginnings, middles. I remember seasons that soared so high they grew wings. And what remains from the center still holds my hand.
downy woodpecker
on the tree trunk beside me–
spirals, holding on
For dVerse, where Frank has given us the subject of memory.
The reservoir always feels deserted–
needled earth, filtered sun,
a perpetual twilight pining away
eternity in framed minutiae.
I can taste the scented secrets,
the startled rustle of the unseen–
familiar shadows of currents bedeviled
by ghostseeds scattered unpollinated,
left hanging unconed. I hold
the image of what is not there–
fragmented, pierced, and resinated–
painting everything in deep
dusky raw rudimentary green.
For the NaPoWriMo prompt today: write your own poem titled “The ________ of ________,” where the first blank is a very particular kind of plant or animal, and the second blank is an abstract noun. The poem should contain at least one simile that plays on double meanings or otherwise doesn’t quite make “sense,” and describe things or beings from very different times or places as co-existing in the same space.
Not sure I met all the parameters, but the title seems right anyway.
K.