Ernst Gombrich

I could tell you about

art history.

Or other things that you don’t

understand.

Or I could tell you about

the things I should’ve.

But what I didn’t keeps me

where I am.

These melodies don’t do much of

holding hands,

And my fingers, they don’t

understand.

Where you went.

Where the warmth is.

Or how my heart

Keeps beating for this.

And these words can’t help to

fill the space,

For your fingers and the

paths they traced

In my palm,

across my mouth.

This stupid hope

keeps coming out.

So I’m a mess,

the car is parked.

Poke at old proverbs,

Here in the dark.

‘cause it’s about time I realized.

I could tell you about

art history.

Current Events

Somewhere in central Texas

people are gathering around candles,

offering up comforting words and

warm embraces,

looking up at the sky for reasons.

Somewhere in southeastern Colorado

a boy’s imagination floated

up out of his front lawn

and captivated the country.

And somewhere on the west coast,

three or four neighborhood kids are jumping

into piles of lifeless autumn in their front lawns.

Here in Philadelphia, the transit workers

are holding picket signs

in picket lines,

holding out for better hours,

or better wages.

Mostly they’re just making us late.

Me, I’m here in the middle of everything,

waking up in the dark,

thinking about the stitches in your winter clothes,

the horse hair on your cello bow.

All the stupid, comfortable little things

that have shifted from constants to variables.

Things are changing,

this I know.

God's moving in your bloodstream.

He’s moving in the bloodshed,

in the air and the seasons.

Even though people are bleeding and dying,

even though the trees are naked

and the sun’s coming later,

even though you are there and I am here,

I am calm with the knowledge

that our hearts remain connected.

We beg rebirth.

Wait for fate to take us up

and parade our souls

out by the back gate.

How We Will

Sometimes when I look at maps, I get overwhelmed with the size of the world.  It’s like the thought of all of the places I am not starts to outweigh the importance of where I am.

And then I start thinking about the physical spaces between us and how they tend to eventually translate into emotional distance.  If it’s true that regret is a circle, I am spinning. 

Then there’s this line of thinking about how the big decisions are never really very big at all.  They’re more the unintentional product of lots of small decisions.  The things we think about as big choices in our lives – our jobs, our relationships – tend to be the product of momentum and reaction.  And I know I keep coming back to this, but I can’t seem to get my head around the momentum I built up and the place it took me.  How I was there and it brought me here.

So I’m always reminding myself that the past is the past; I recite old adages.  It seems like every other day I’m repeating quotes framed in my memory about silver linings and how everything happens for a reason.   But still I am here, 80 miles east of the place I should be.  And while my friends are all finding their ways, I just sit and think about how I gave mine up. 

Maybe, though, I should be thinking about how I’m going to get it back.

I think that maybe it’s fitting that while the curbs and gutters are filling up with old leaves, my life is too.  When I should be turning new ones, maybe now I’m far enough removed from this to now look at it from a perspective outside of my own and realize exactly what happened.

Because the more I look at maps, the easier it is to see where I belong.

20-15   11-14-15-23   8-15-23   23-5   23-9-12-12   5-14-4.

Then I'll Stay

Think I’m mixing up the seasons again.

Keep walking around in the autumn of my mind.  Taking in the smell of the coming cold and counting the leaves as they fall. And if it’s true that they’re most beautiful right before they die, our love was never a tree. 

I’m looking at this picture of us, opposing ends of a puzzle.  Strangely symbolic of how things worked for so long. When you were upside down, I was rightside up.  When I was about to fall, you were the rope around my waist.

And it is strangely fitting that my life would follow the universe in its slow rotation upon itself.  It is significant to me to be here, reduced from adjacent hearts to a short walk together in between them.  Just as I discovered you once, with rain on your chin and a glow in your eyes, I am finding you again.

I am forgetting what you once told me, only to find myself remembering again.  With my feet on a slightly curved path that I have come to know well.

It is strange. 

It’s a current that I can’t fight.  A tide that I can’t keep my chin above.

I keep drawing parallels from then to now, trace lines that only translate to a day.

But if you’re awake, tell me it’s safe.

Entropy