Easter Journal

I’ve been busy with all sorts of things lately, and have made little progress. Ah, busy spring. I have a lot of things I’m finding that could really use some attention. Time time time. Hear the bells chime, and all that. Or, here it is in another way:

Easter Journal



One of those mornings with the completely empty sky
where you can see the sun rising, the rise of it,
millimeter by millimeter, through the trees and roofline,
so that you’ve stilled yourself to a near stop. Which of us
is it breathing, you might ask, just before it’s too bright
and you have to look away, while the people we meant to be
continue into the no wind on the back porch this afternoon,
so that being outside feels like being inside, but with
different background noise, and a little cooler and full sun—

As is the way with most fragments, it goes on for some time,
so that the totality has an intimidating immensity
that you rather hope not to find, after all, it’s a depleted age
where walking away from such things has its own grandeur,
even if the band is out of time and relegated to carry-on items,
winking and pulling tablecloths out from under the dishes,
where saying over and over that we’re searching for something
stands in for a reason to search and then stands in for finding it.

Presently things will start up and go on awhile,
around the buildings and down the avenue. The people we meant to be
will be there with all the old nicknames, as it’s a buffet
mostly, where we can feel taxed by our choices and ill-health,
but that’s this other fragment, the one we haven’t found yet
that hovers just out of reach in another slow orbit.

Wait awhile and the weather improves, and inside and outside
seem nearly completely different again, except for that second
hovering in the doorway like a cat, suddenly ambivalent,
and nearly perfectly happy. It’s a wonder sometimes
how most of the old strategies still work. This spring it’s tulips first,
and hooded sweatshirts. How long can I stay counting
before saying, get on with it, or, please, or help, as moving around
or standing still is all pretty much the same thing
when looked at from far enough away, so that it all had to turn out
just like this, as if it were all one very long, unpronounceable word.