On the First Cold Day of 2018

Today felt like first winter when you're kind of delighted it's Christmastime but the sky is pewter and the air is cold and you wonder if it's ever going to be a bright, sunshiny day again. Halfway between desolation and utter joy.

You think of all the dead, but also of the children who still wonder at the magic. And the knowledge that one day in the not-too-distant future, you'll be among the dead they're missing at the table, wishing you could make it easier for them.

In the meantime, the constellations turn in their heavens and never notice the tiny starts and finishes of the ants who live upon this hill. And people wonder why I never make the bed.

11/01/2018

Inside Out

Outside

Doves the color of dust.
Dust scattered with seed.
Birds eat as though
nothing has changed.
Chatterings
continue unabated.


Inside

Movements have disturbed
old dust 

that settled, quiet

over time
on unmoving things until
we'd almost stopped seeing them.
Silence
after the roar.


Outside

In the aftermath I wait,
wincing at the insistent sun,
and fear the naked air.
Turn away, look back as
this rusted truck takes
roads long denied.
Dust lingers in its wake.

    ~ Elodie Pritchartt, 2007

Long Gone

In the pictures
we seldom smiled.

Stubborn children
forced to pause
and pose before the hearth
in the cabin
in the woods
in the childhood
in the life
he'd built
in the
happy time.

He pulls the tattered box
From under the bed,
studies each fading moment
for clues.
The lamp sheds no new light
On the mystery of us.

The smell of dust,
the screen door’s slam,
the island in the pond
saddles in the shed,
the boat, the chill,
the sweat, the water,
the shadow and the light
the silence of a Sunday
night waiting
while he locked the gate.

Turned the key
On another memory.

The sandbar,
Alligator gar and
Busch beer in a pull-tab can.
Dinosaurs, all gone
like the sound of a horn on a barge,
first large then drifting away.

He puts the pictures back,
Hopes the phone won’t ring,
bringing something new
to grieve.
Lying back, he sighs,
Closes his eyes and waits.