Long, long time

since I came here and said hello to myself or whatever it is that I am trying to sing into or out of in the specifics of this forum. It's one thirty in the morning, I am not home and I will be on a plane soon to be home. I am feeling that at sea feeling of not being where one lives and not feeling very at home in the transitional homes we make when we travel. So I went into my books, Lisa Olstein lately, and I found what home I always do in her kind of words. Tonight I am struck with how certain seasons effort in quietly and others crash in and no season really leaves us without impact. There will be another new baby in my life in April and what other chairs will be pulled after the music stops, there is no way of knowing. But I try, like another quietly-efforting poet, to dwell in possibility and when I can focus in, I also dwell in prose. Tonight, I think I should dwell in waiting sheets and the too-little slumber that precedes too long a day. But with luck and some portion of a blessing, I will sleep in my own bed tomorrow night, which as darkness sometimes keeps me from recalling, is really tonight.


Dear One Absent This Long WhileBy Lisa Olstein

It has been so wet stones glaze in moss;
everything blooms coldly.

I expect you. I thought one night it was you
at the base of the drive, you at the foot of the stairs,

you in a shiver of light, but each time
leaves in wind revealed themselves,

the retreating shadow of a fox, daybreak.
We expect you, cat and I, bluebirds and I, the stove.

In May we dreamed of wreaths burning on bonfires
over which young men and women leapt.

June efforts quietly.
I’ve planted vegetables along each garden wall

so even if spring continues to disappoint
we can say at least the lettuce loved the rain.

I have new gloves and a new hoe.
I practice eulogies. He was a hawk

with white feathered legs. She had the quiet ribs
of a salamander crossing the old pony post road.

Yours is the name the leaves chatter
at the edge of the unrabbited woods.