Why It’s Called the Evening

Sometimes I wonder why
I live so much life
when you are done
living yours each day.
As you lie in your bed,
resting and recovering
from the energy spent
being you or assuming
the role draped across
your waking shoulders,
I come to life,
in the near-sleep,
staring straight up
into the dark, where
my imagination shines.
While you sleep,
we are performing
feats unthinkable
in daytime, when
the light blinds
my mind’s eye.
It is my balancing time
between day’s dull reality
and night’s brilliant hope,
no matter how fanciful.
Maybe that’s why it’s called
the Evening.

Poem-a-Day for April 26th, an “evening” poem.

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On This Sea of White Light

I sit here by myself.
I am solitary. As usual,
Yet I’m speaking to you.
You are sitting there,
alone in your chair.
Yet you are listening to me.
Our hermit lives aren’t wrong,
just separate from the throng,
a decision made in a moment,
over a lifetime.
But by whom?
Them? Him? Her? Us?
You? Me?
Yes. The simple answer.
We are exiles, banished,
displaced, singletons,
because no one wants us,
sometimes not even ourselves.
But even in exile, we are together.
Because I am speaking to You
(yes, You)
and you are listening to me
(yes, still Me),
in our solitary confinements
we share with a world,
each other and no one else.
Soon I’ll rise from this island,
as will you from yours,
but you’ll not be alone
because I’m with you now.
And, on this sea of white light,
you’re exiled with me.

Day 25. An “exile” poem.

Unreasonable

Each night I lie in bed
and ponder why I still sit
in that chair every day
trying to tell stories
of a me and a you
that never happened,
why I scribble about memories
that are the barest of vapors
moved by a breath I’ll
never feel on my cheek.
These days I ponder
that same question even
as I sit in this chair
talking to myself alone and
not listening, just transcribing
the silence where once spoke reason.
Maybe that’s why I still do this.
I’m searching for reason
where reason doesn’t exist.
No longer reasonable,
yet unreasonably necessary.

Day 17. A “reason” poem. It’s true. I lie in bed at night and wonder why I even do this pointless exercise, this seemingly fruitless waste of what time I have left. Then I get up, sit in this chair, open a new document, start typing and still don’t know why. Maybe that last sentence, which I just looked up and found sitting there, is my unconscious self’s explanation. It’s necessary for at least one of us.

Leafing Through My Memory

There are times I still see You,
though surely not how you are now.
The You I see is green and supple,
bouncing upon a branch
with scores more of your kind.
And yet I see You.
But this is how it goes
with a man such as I,
who sees a You like no other.
You who have been ripped
from that tree, buffeted
and sucked dry of your youth,
now stuck in a place where
the winds will not let you go.
But I see You as you were.
Since I was always one to miss
the forest for the tree,
miss the whole tree for your leaf.
And now I miss your leaf
for the space it has left
in my mind’s sky.

Recapturing His Muse to Let Loose His Wolf

I’d like to tell you a story,
but, nowadays, the stories
just won’t come.
I’ve tried all the old instigators,
but none of those break the spell
rendering me dumb.

So let’s try making something happen
as I’ve had to for so many,
many weeks.
A poem punctuated with rhyming words
at least rolls the ball downhill,
though not up any peaks.

There’s this guy I know, perhaps so do you,
whose life feels empty when he can’t
tell a story.
He’s told all kinds, from weepy to creepy
even gory, though none yet
a “Finding Dory.”

He thought a muse could bring him
the old inspiration, grist for
his creative mill.
But, of course, she was an illusion,
even to herself, now a wraith
of substance nil.

And so one day he reaches into that ether,
grasping at straws
not really there.
For five hundred more words,
or even for two, so long as they’re
not more hot air.

“I’ll tell you what,” he said to
the ghost of she who felt she was
his Keats’s Fanny Brawne.
“Just say a phrase, and in misery
I’ll phrase, a story sad as
Yeats’s with Made Gonne.”

So now he’s off to string thoughts
of some kind, in a story,
kind of together.
Of course this story’s about me,
now feeling free, loosing my prosaic wolf
from its tether.

Memories of a You I Can’t Recall

I’d ask your name, but I already know.
It’s who you are behind it I forget.
Or perhaps I never really knew, so…
Maybe you are someone I’ve never met.

I’ve forgotten so many old faces,
their names have nothing to hang onto there.
Though sometimes I’ll enter these old places
and recall how that light danced in your hair.

Some tell me this is part of growing old,
losing the treasure of recollection.
But that faculty has long since grown cold
since I felt the sting of your rejection.

So here by this window I sit and write,
of you nonexistent, and times so bright.

Back from making new memories with a sweet little girl in North Carolina to this cold space where I forget so much. Some worth the forgetting. Some not. Which, I can’t recall. 

Waiting With Hopeful Heart

Winter is creeping
off with Spring today,
slowly nibbled away
by a Sun that knows
an angle (and temperature)
greater than 32 degrees.
You can hear it ebbing away
in heartbeat drips
down the waterspout
from the gutters.
Tock, tock, tock…
The sun is granting
storm-fallen branches
early release from
snow’s grip on the yard,
providing enough heat
for them to flex space
around their plaintive reaches.
Invisible robins are providing
vocals atop the beat
from the gutters and
the wind sounds different,
with its Southern accent.
Bluebirds flit among
the maples’ red buds,
waiting for them to go off
like vernal fireworks.
And I sit and wait,
for what I don’t know, but
listening with hopeful heart.
Tock, tock, tock…

Photo © Joseph Hesch 2018