POEM: An Ordinary Song

School is still out & the town is out of breath without its kids. I am constantly tired, not eager to rise in the earl grey light that peeks between the college’s gothic steeples. Maybe I want to sleep in but can’t. I cannot enjoy the leftover time in bed, the barricaded cold, coma warm blankets, the twisted bodies, our sheltered forms among the sheets. I sleep the way a father does who cannot sleep so deeply knowing his children are out, until the door finally latches behind the last one in at last. One exhale.
Thank you ice on my windshield spreading like a stitch
Thank you slate sky, scratched with fingernail white lines of ghostly planes so remote, off to warm lands. Thank you strangely anxious light over mountain sleep, dreaming of summer heat.

These days when I wake, I reach for my partner wanting to feel her body heat, because the warmth assures me that I am here, I have not been disappeared. That the sun will rise today, that I will dress & join the circular ordinariness of others: will shave, will eat breakfast, will drive to work & be consumed by daylight. The sun that rises appears to me as a grand gift reopening. The soft white noise of the car defroster offers me wordless song in elephant frequency.

Behind the ordinary is sadness, solid, waiting like soil in winter, what we must eventually immerse our hands in getting the scent over our fingers, go through the day with it, like cologne. Leaving dreams behind, making a way, I make eye contact with total strangers & hoping for a moment that I know him, co-resident in this opening, the contact, however awkward, hovers like coffee aroma.

Thank you ice on my windshield spreading like a stitch
Thank you slate sky, scratched with fingernail white lines of ghostly planes so remote, off to warm lands. Thank you strangely anxious light over mountain sleep, dreaming of summer heat.

I don’t know why in the play in my head it is always she who dies before me. Why do I think that? There is the shiver of a razor in first reactions. It is not a fear of being alone but not knowing what to do next, who am I in such hard absence?

I have always been afraid of growing disheveled, of having others say, “See how he has let himself go since her passing.” I do not want to let myself go. I want to keep a tight grip.

Since light was born I measured all distance relative to her body, her azure eyes, her loving hands.

Thank you ice on my windshield spreading like a stitch
Thank you slate sky, scratched with fingernail white lines of ghostly planes so remote, off to warm lands. Thank you strangely anxious light over mountain sleep, dreaming of summer heat.