Part of my Feb 2024 Dream Poems project.
Arriving & Leaving
Walking loosely in the woods, alongside ponds and oceans,
coves that are calm, coves that are choppy,
I’m remembering swimming across this choppy cove and
almost not making it, but that’s not now. Now
I’m with a blonde woman and a 10-year-old boy
who’s not mine and not hers, the three of us finding ourselves
up here in Maine, on our way to see something,
so on we move, our pace like falling leaves, no rush,
and then we’re here, seeing something, enjoying it.
Later, evening, we have to leave, before we’re trail-blind,
and we sense the stirring shift, the way the fading light
suggests the path, but she won’t go.
She wants to wait. She’s waiting
until the school principal, have I mentioned him?,
finishes work, exits the school we passed earlier today –
maybe I slowed, the blankness of the windowed box
registering faintly, maybe I turned, like deer
orienting their unquiet gaze toward a ripple,
a rupture, a sundering cessation –
She wants to wait until he’s waiting for her, because
they are each other’s, and she will risk her safety and mine,
even the boy’s, without a thought. She will finally grope tightly
along the darksome edges, sure with hope,
into that desolate clearing where he will emerge, dark,
the building still vacant, as vacant as ever, the shadows reshaping.
I wish I could remember what we saw, what the boy saw,
that so satisfied us, that felt like a promise fulfilled as we
hummed like the rooted trees, languid and secure under a watery sun,
the broad daylight a dazzling cove, so calm.
© M Wm 2024
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