8th & 9th April, 2006
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Photo by
Edward Habib McKuen. ©2006 by Stanyan Audio Video Archives
A Thought for Today
If your life doesn’t seem to be adding
up, try subtracting something.
TO BEGIN WITH
After what seemed like a solid month of bad weather most of us in
Southern California were looking forward to a few sunny April skies. So
much for anticipation. It has rained for three days and nights without
stopping and the ground probably can’t take too much more. Last night we
lost two Fichus trees that had been in the back yard for as long as I
can remember. Hard to complain too much considering the trouble the
torrents of spring seem to be churning up across the rest of America and
throughout Europe.
FROM the¨BOOKS
Two Poems from RUSTING in the RAIN
And Yet
Love winds down,
as does the day, life too
at some unexpected moment.
We do not anticipate any of it.
Love could have, should have, given us
a
few more precious moments.
The day is never long enough.
Too few hours, much left undone.
And life? Who but a fool wants to
let go of it?
And yet,
you cannot, dare not,
take love beyond its chosen,
natural course.
Without night
what asylum would we have from the rigor
of the day. Life, my life, yours, insignificant
to anyone but us.
The universe revolved,
evolved, without us and will go on turning
when we are rust and dust and gone.
You come back to me,
horizon to horizon,
the stars do not inhibit your return.
Your face framed by the filigree
of fireflies
or the suns’ undoing is still your face.
It needs no elaboration to be more
than what it is. A face, what I prize
above all else, unless it is the rest of you
validating all of me.
And yet,
I do forget you
at odd times, congering
is no substitute for conjugal.
Away I worry that your loved smile,
tolerated frown, will fade from memory
the way a paid off debt does. That is
because I depend on the reality of you
more than I trust my own imagination.
As each dawn’s edge
slips away unable to return
and we make light of it or worse,
note not it’s passing,
morning is little more than the end
of night. So much of what we do and
are is made of mere perception,
the rim of anything is mere whim
and not much more.
And yet,
-from Rusting in the Rain, 2003
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