And then...

 

Change is like that strong smell

of cut grass or chopped wood

that stops you still.

Patterns, a symbol can be

an illegible sign, 

at first glance.

Or a certain light at sunset, 

or dark that whispers

Where am I coming from?

You are always going

Somewhere.

Next to nothing seems impossible.

I am next.

Painting by Orazio Gentileschi, 'Portrait of a Young Woman as a Sibyl' (c. 1620-1626) from Google Art Project via Wikimedia Commons in Public Domain. 

Round the bend

At this time
change felt like the fog rolling in
and when driving into the road mirage
and not hitting a thing-

in a blur that stranges the familiar,
stretches out time a little
like a band,
rubber or air-the change

lingered heavier than mist,
more solid than virga,
icy in all the same clear ways that
when you try to cut it out

from what was always
called Now I am-
like routine and rut,
running along the edges fray,
more than decor, drapery, or flax
like flux, anticipated
or a natural change
of season.

It could have been
Only that-

At this time,
comforts naked shoulder
cooled in the exposure,

where same,
felt somehow strange
like never before.





Image credit By U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Our Lady Alexandria

What feels like Now is never heavy enough

to last longer than a Sunday.

Idle times like June, we tend to wander too far,

it takes august

to bring us back to routine.

Presently, reading.

Presently writing

Then and Now lying in front of me,

blurred by biography autonomously-

     whose voice is lost in the amplified volume

of imposition

     whose own prosaic tome is never true or tight enough

to carry the note all the way,

to cut the final folio, to fill the flyleaves.

More memory appalls dead weight

          one will carry to the cemetery, nary a soul should know  

Those things, flammable flashbacks attack hard back, unhinged

in carnation

in damnation

in citation,

My cover slowly singing, smoldering as I am oldering,

lighter 

Now (transparent)

on paper backs.

Painting By Juan de Echevarría (Bilbao, Spain, 1875 - Madrid, 1931) Born in Bilbao, Spain. Dead in Madrid. Details of artist on Google Art Project [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Ritually Custom

'Tis a sensuous tribute to Time

that we caress the Moment,

knowing it curves and gestures

that sink into warm familiar coves,

sucking in all its nectar

as newly brewed.

Again, more, and a gain!

Let us do the steps-

in orderly,

walk with me, mirroring see,

strut through it

then and again

like it is your old house.

Right now, 

exactly like it was

when you remembered what

you came here for.

Tho never was it

the same, all most

re-placed.

Like last Time

bittersweet lingers not long 

enough.

Like seasons and seconds,

more tradition and Time

to do the same.

Plump predictions and ripe fruitions

bursting with Now

smelling like Then

we recognize This

time

as the Rite Time

to harvest

a gain.

Image By Mennonite Church USA Archives (1975 St Catherines Tradition Poster) [No restrictions], via Wikimedia Commons.