Poem #8 Banquet

posted November 9, 2018

We have waited for this day.

We didn’t know what we’d been missing
Until we drove out of town, through the last color––
Bursts of yellows and oak-tawny leaves
The flip in our stomachs as we crest the mountains
That ring this bowl we call home.

We missed the best part of the autumn
The pretty part
Lost as if surgically removed
We gaze around now,
Surprised by the truncated days
The bare trees
What happened to the Forest of Arden?
All our rituals at Michaelmas?

They will have to wait until next year
And today you believe there will be a next year.

Our work is to keep circling back to hope. To this day.
We made our escape, didn’t we?
Given four eyesful of sunlight
Blue blue heavens
Frames through which to see

You saw me again.

Part of me
Is still stuck in that moment
When you pointed to your phone
Distressed about what was never there
You
Repeating four words
In different combinations
Your eyes became colorless

I felt a haze of brown smog
Descend around my forehead
Pulling tight

We try never to go back to that moment
We must go back to that moment
We can never go back to that moment

I saw you
And I lost you
I saved you
And I lost you
I heard you
And I missed everything you said.

Come back to hope: today.
We approach the moment again
We circle it
We almost laugh
We examine our wounds
Our aging bodies
Don’t they make us laugh too?
Look what they can’t do anymore! HA!

All the moments in our lives
Especially the ones we can’t go back to and must go back to
Prepare us for death.
We know this,
And still. And so:
Let us feast on the remnants of color
This mid-November banquet.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Read More Like This

All Roads Lead to Homer: Quest-Driven Novels, (Part 1)

I started these stories because I knew I had to write about my years on the road as part of another folk-rock band. What I experienced as an itinerant musician, traveling and performing with family members and lovers, gave me an education I couldn’t have paid for, an education that makes my time in an Ivy League institution pale in comparison. As Melville’s character Ishmael says of the whale ship he lived aboard for the span of Moby-Dick’s timeline, “It was my Yale College and my Harvard.” So was my Moby, the white fifteen-passenger Dodge Ram van we traveled within for the better part of the 1990s. 
September 30, 2023

Poem #13–A Council of Guitars

There’s a muscle in my back Left trapezoid, north of the rhomboid That never relaxes. It’s the muscle that can’t stop grabbing for the guitar. “There, there, there!” I show…
November 14, 2018

House Like a Wheel (apologies to Anna McGarrigle)

What if a house were like a wheel?How would that be any different from the way things are?Your days would begin level enoughBut then as the sun rose, imperceptibly(Except for…
November 29, 2011