A day of spring sunshine and the wind is wild and balmy. Wispy clouds sweep across the pale blue sky. There’s bright green shoots in the garden. The heads of white blossoms newly open hang on delicate necks moving with the breeze.
The phone rings. Half an hour ago you left.
The sun shines.
The wind blows.
And the little white heads bob up and down on those impossibly delicate necks.
I would like to sing
In tones of dusky blue
A song to share life gone by
Of joys and sorrow we pass through
Smoke would ring around the notes and mingle in the sound
The words and notes would strike a chord in all our memories found
The spotlight finds the common note that in us all reside
The dark beyond the stage of life is where those memories hide
I would like to sing
In tones of dusky blue
A song to share life gone by
Of joys and sorrow we pass through
A face wears life. Inside and out. A garment revealing time gone.
Feathers of orange and combs of blue
The sky is pink
Black onion through and through
The ocean falls
Steel rises to the sky
Round fat men hang from invisible strings
Above that purple second rising in the mist
Gone
We are all gone
Coyotes cry ooooooooolly ooooooooolly oxen free in the twilight gloaming
His first wife had left him. He’d never seen it coming and was only aware of her reasons in a vague sort of way.
He had remarried, a woman a little older than him. His wife had been raised by a single mother who couldn’t always be home because of the job required to raise her children but had shown love and kept her presence constant with home cooking. His second wife brought this to their marriage. He would often complain that her cooking made him fat but he continued to fill himself up with the food that was the physical manifestation of her love for him.
Every night before his second wife went to bed she would pack his lunch. It would be waiting for him when he got up for work at 5 am. He occasionally told her that he didn’t expect it and that she didn’t have to do it. One morning when his second wife had forgotten to put something together, he crept into their bedroom in the predawn darkness to wake her up and tentatively ask ” Is everything okay?”, “Are you mad at me?”. What he really meant, what he really was asking was – ” Do you still love me? Did I do something wrong like I did the first time? Please tell me because I still don’t understand. Are you going to leave me too?”.
“I’ll get up”, she said with a yawn, she had settled into the warm spot he had left as soon as he got out of the bed, “I just forgot”.
“No, no” he said, “I was just wondering if everything was okay”. In his head he knew, as he watched his second wife nestle deeper under the blankets, that it was okay but in his heart he still wondered.
