Notes on a Wednesday Just Gone

Predawn, a Dream, Literally

I saw a single light
High on a cliff cut
Up on the side
Of a rounded, dark
Mountain, and I

Felt an ache like
A crush for a girl
To live in the little
House by that light
Even though it was by

The side of the road
The cut made room
For, where cars shot
By its windows. I longed,
I craved it, I can't see why.

Midday, through the Woods

I bump into a young man whom I know
To be mentally ill, and he asks me
How I'm doing. I say I'm well
And ask him the same. "Getting
Through," he shrugs. We smile.
It's all getting through, isn't it?
The snow melts, the clouds go over,
People do kind and awful things,
We lie in bed and count the breath
Getting through our nostrils,
First one way, then the other.
An honest answer, then, although
I know he meant it to suggest less
Than ordinary living, a tough time,
No better than the obvious fact
That for the moment he's still
Going. I of course interpret this
Wrongly. I detect encouraging
Sanity in his wryly delivered
Bit of grin. Were he to have kicked
Up his heels and grabbed my hand
In both of his and shouted
"I'm great," it would have been
Scarier. So it goes and goes
Through all of us, just as we go
Through all of it going and are
Our sense of the going. Getting. Go.

Evening, Home

All the langsam, long, lonesome afternoon,
The repetitive, plaintive choruses
Of Lang's Match Girl Passion
Weave themselves through and encircle
My chattering thoughts, as if the sad waif
Herself were begging me and entangling
My legs as I walked--help me,
Help me, have mercy,
Have mercy, stay
With me, stay with me.

In the evening, then, my own reprise
Beside the banked-up fireside:
Can it help you then to think
About it now? Can it help you
Then, to think about it now?
How not to think about what might
Occur then, being helpless now?
If only the going of this went through
Soothingly smoothly like this cup
Of purple "Passion" tea passed to me
While the snow grips itself
In fresh blankets of hoarfrost
And the deer gather around
Our small, borrowed home in the dark
Without a sound, without pleading,
Just breathing, help me, help me,
Have mercy, have mercy, stay
With me, stay


With



Me.