in the fields
where I used to play
the world has changed . . .
everything seems smaller
even blades of grass
What you saw on that empty hillside many decades ago, I’ll never really know because you took that vision with you to your grave. What you made of it though, remains a pleasant memory even if time has not wasted any time in etching it slowly away. The shelves in the gun-room have other people’s stuff on them now. The cobwebs in the attic are new. The rock garden has been ripped out but ants in the yard are still building castles in the sand.
I can remember the creaky sequence of five doors opening and closing through the garage and into the kitchen. A wooden thunk, a spring, a click, a gentle yawn, a clunk. Did you purposely build that into my memories of you? I mean, there you were on the foundation of your dreams raising a home where I could come alive. What I took away from that is nothing less than the stuff of a mythical adventure.
Still, it wasn’t a structure that stood at the center of my universe. It was you. Wood and stone and plaster were no match for your whit, patience, and capacity to love and forgive. What you built beside that little hill can’t be measured with watch or stick. Every year the leaves come falling down. I’m sorry I can’t rake them all but that never really mattered to you, now did it?
dreams conceived beneath the stars
have returned to the meadow
where life remains
a poem on the lips
of a child
Atlas Poetica #34 September 2018
