Year’s end always sends thoughts into the past.
Review and reflection. Celebrations and regrets. Conclusions.
But briefly. Then to a future near
and far but all unclear, unformed, undetermined.
Momentarily, no present. No now. No self.
Tag past
Two-Hearted River
I flow today like this two-hearted river.
My energies come from two different places
in my past that should have passed,
but they have pooled around me today.
I’m trying to empty them. Dissipation. Loss.
The most famous Two Hearted River runs through Michigan and the branches drain into Lake Superior. That’s not my two-hearted river.
The World’s Fair
I no longer believe in the green
light on Daisy’s dock, or any place,
or the future moving away from me.
But I do believe we’re boats against
the current, borne back into the past.
“Gatsby” via www.flickr.com
Saturday
Worked hard outside all day, then sat
with a cup of tea that she
brought with a madeleine cookie to remember
things past and talk of this present
and watch the sunset on her hair.
Pentimento
A new year is drawn but shows
days recently erased still beneath. It’s repentance.
It has a long life. It bleeds
through the new work, day, life
and haunts the wet, freshly painted present.
Picasso’s 1901 Blue Period painting The Blue Room under infrared imaging revealed another portrait underneath the room scene. This pentimento is a bearded man in formal wear wearing a number of rings on his fingers. Did Pablo run out of money for a new canvas, or did he regret what he had painted?
At Fourteen
At fourteen, I thought less about the future
and, unaware of Buddhism, lived in the moment.
Even a day was usually unplanned, spontaneous,
open to what the universe had planned for me.
If life is like a sonnet, the turn occurred when
the future became my focus and the present
rushed by out of control, and the past
became nostalgia, a read book fondly remembered.
At fourteen, I believed, without proof, in eternity.
The days unfolded unbidden and I was content
in thinking at some point I would be able to see
That fourteen-year-old’s future is my present,
slipping away from what I wanted it to be,
and even partially my past, now already spent.
Writing the Day 