The cultural differences between four time zones
or 2946 miles based upon the routes usually followed by motorists
or between
New York and San Francisco because the map did not list Oakland
and Brooklyn or movement from Oakland back to Brooklyn and these
spaces that ramble out between.
Not generic like it could be or
could have been anywhere between but specific to this longitude
and latitude and geographical
region.
Not to be generic in the collaboration between
poet and sculptor and hers with hers and moving over the horizon
from
this viewpoint
or vantage or bare trees brown tan grow gray not green.
Bones
against the edges of a sky gone gray gone winter.
One spot of
blood like a Northern Cardinal or a Blue Jay or a Western Bluebird
or an American Goldfinch but then evergreen
out in the outer distance.
Shopping mall and highway not interstate
or freeway but shopping plaza and gas station marking center.
Three
bars and a pizza shop and a hardware store mark the distance.
More
like cow pasture leads into shopping mall leads into Dunkin Donuts
and Olive Garden and Applebee’s leads into gas stations
and local bars leads into cow pasture leads into country road
leads into forest leads into open door of a shed.
Not speaking to him or not being spoken to.
Difficult to trust
or gesture out and back again.
In the movie the parrot returned
to the unloved not to the beloved regardless of her costume.
To
press sound into the receiver or to say darling if I could
be there with you.
To say darling as if it could.
But with a woodstove and a sense
of might be gone forever.
Warm colors tied in knots in yarn across my lap and he falls
into dream on the little couch over my left shoulder.
To create
space after he created objects or sculpture.
To have conjured
him in daydream and to have been that specifically specific although
you me we haven’t met yet.
The ease of it she said and I
thought back to our first face to face conversation.
A birthmark
on a brand new lip or hip or wrist and the curling of hair I
hadn’t yet inhabited or noticed.
To want and to be wanted.
Was I loved or was I used?
And it was both and it was neither.
A distance now between two grown women like sister or mother
a field blows strands of tall beige grass beyond the outer distance.
Or
Sugar Maples are large with rounded dense crowns and multicolored
foliage in autumn turning red orange and yellow while bark
is light gray becoming rough deeply furrowed into narrow scaly
ridges.
And an ache with it.
Or an aching to be home.
|