herbavore
Bluelight Crew
November 2014
This grey light familiar
Understood as dawn
and as home
and yet I did have lives in other rooms that
I cannot now remember
ever filling
with such watery November light.
(Right now: a strong remembrance of yellow
splits into my waking sight like lightening
and is gone)
Here, palest lavender like a winter sky above me
And the sun only managing one small patch of ivory
filigree of shivering lace,
filtered through the stand of eucalyptus to the east,
dancing soundlessly on the wall where my blue robe hangs
worn thin from so many mornings.
Childhood is far behind me.
Only slips of it,
like this memory of saturated yellow,
sometime escape from what I must have
just now been dreaming.
Old photographs of myself are strangers
But not quite.
Soft girls I feel now I should have protected more,
Held onto like daughters
But gave away without a backward glance
Before they could be known,
Ruthless as I was to charge off unencumbered
into my own life.
This morning it is the one in Montana
That woke in a yellow room
Summer, the scent of tomato plants in the garden,
Clover and alfalfa growing in the dry hard soil of the fields beyond.
A life in which not one thing she’d ever cared about had died;
She’s the one I would like to speak with.
She’s the one whose hand I would ask to hold just now.
This grey light familiar
Understood as dawn
and as home
and yet I did have lives in other rooms that
I cannot now remember
ever filling
with such watery November light.
(Right now: a strong remembrance of yellow
splits into my waking sight like lightening
and is gone)
Here, palest lavender like a winter sky above me
And the sun only managing one small patch of ivory
filigree of shivering lace,
filtered through the stand of eucalyptus to the east,
dancing soundlessly on the wall where my blue robe hangs
worn thin from so many mornings.
Childhood is far behind me.
Only slips of it,
like this memory of saturated yellow,
sometime escape from what I must have
just now been dreaming.
Old photographs of myself are strangers
But not quite.
Soft girls I feel now I should have protected more,
Held onto like daughters
But gave away without a backward glance
Before they could be known,
Ruthless as I was to charge off unencumbered
into my own life.
This morning it is the one in Montana
That woke in a yellow room
Summer, the scent of tomato plants in the garden,
Clover and alfalfa growing in the dry hard soil of the fields beyond.
A life in which not one thing she’d ever cared about had died;
She’s the one I would like to speak with.
She’s the one whose hand I would ask to hold just now.
