I like to think there’s something vaster than myself,
Hidden in the past, to be rekindled by a word…
-- John Koethe, “Belmont Park”
Sitting on my parents’ green sofa and
staring out the big picture window, as I’d
done so many afternoons, the room
empty of music and books, except the west
wind blowing through the screens, curtains floating
like a ghost, and here it is October,
the apples have ripened and the corn picked,
the wind gusting, unnatural so late
in the year, 85 degrees and the trees
bending in the deep blue of memory,
sitting as I’d sat for days when my mind
slept after so many pills, the drowsy
wordlessness, empty as the vacant lot
across the road, hearing ghosts whisper
in the periphery, soulless waiting
for consciousness to return, but here,
the wind washing the world and sweating,
thinking of nothing but the fullness
of feeling, feeling now as if there’s nothing
but feeling, and waiting, staring
out the window, at the oak branches
dipping, the same brunt grass, and the vacant
lot, the anxiousness of space full of nothing
but the wind, and now, caught between that
emptiness and fullness, alone and thinking,
this is how he wanted to pass, his breath
labored by the shrinking lung and asbestos
knots, to simply scatter like ashes
in the wind, sleepy, drowsing consciousness
drifting, swept free of memory, only wondering,
wondering, all of my life waiting
for this moment, for this passing, this wordless
yearning, all the hours playing baritone,
filling the brass with something that swelled
with feeling, the elegy and all the wondering,
wandering, all the yearning to feel
something known as love, and loss, and the hope
and the hot wind off the harvest fields, what
the west carries, empty and fulsome, it’s
all passing again, like it always has,
for the very first time.
