Nineteen days and then some

I am on an extended break from my university with months ahead of me, free from just about everything but idleness: no work, no class, no plans.

I never realized how tiring nothingness can get. Days are insignificant – even weeks are depraved of their meaning. I was told that it was a big day on this coming Thursday and that I had plans – I wondered what they were and then realized my birthday, another insignificant event. Business for one day, then idleness for the rest of the spectrum of summer.

When I lay down in a lounge chair outside, or simply collapse and sprawl out on the grass or on the wooden planks of the deck, basking in sunlight, it feels like there is something to do. I then realize there really isn’t, and drift guiltily on into a nap or my thoughts.

Wayfaring will eventually start eating up some of my time, and getting on my bicycle and travelling around the lake, perhaps writing, reading, and music, too – nevertheless, there is a drone in the back of my mind at all times that speaks of lazy summers, of going into the woods for the sake of punching out old, punky and rotten trees, of weeding Japanese knotweed and watching carefully, day by day, by basil grow large enough to make it on its own in the garden. Perhaps poetry will spread its roots amidst all this fertile, tilled soiled.

Sojourn

Loneliness. The ends of the Earth,
where the semblance of spirits spoke
through her misleading smiles –
those glib threads upon which all
hope and integrity were suspended.

Along my path when I lost my way,
I was merry to meet a woman there.
The flicker of her sapphire eyes was
my burning beacon among the blur,
but the shroud of smoke had grown too
thick, the aroma of scorched Pitch Pine,
Ash and Elm too sharp, too unkind;
my fingertips touched only the mist.

Others’ company, the joy of man,
is but an augmentation of the dust.
There was a moment during the cold
blast of winter where I met her
again, wistful beneath a dark wool shawl,
and in the time it took for the
wind to drown out my quiet voice,
she faltered and drifted away with the
leaves and the snow into the
merciless swirling white that
looked a little bit like beauty.