How do I know you
have returned?
The ruffs that soften
around the necks of daffodils.
The arrogant bees
lording it over the trellis.
Bursts of pollen, tell-tale marks
like gunpowder on sleeves of pavement.
In the dark I hear the frogs again,
whetting their voices on cold creek stones.
Most of all that tendril of clear
uncertainty: knowing what could be lost.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
OTHER POSTS IN THE SERIES
- Always a Story
- Landscape with Sudden Rain, Wet Blooms, and a Van Eyck Painting
- Letter to Implacable Things
- Landscape, with Cave and Lovers
- Miniatures
- Letter to Self, Somewhere Other than Here
- Ghazal with a Few Variations
- Letter to Silence
- Landscape, with Returning Things
- Postcard to Grey
- Not Yet There
- Letter to the Street Where I Grew Up (City Camp Alley, Baguio City)
- Between
- Parable of Sound
- Letter to Providence
- Glint
- Letter to Longing
- [poem temporarily removed by author]
- Twenty Questions
- [poem temporarily removed by author]
- Interlude
- Villanelle of the Red Maple
- Letter to Leaving or Staying
- Salutation
- Letter to Love
- Letter to Fortune
- Territories
- Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe
- Dear season of hesitant but clearing light,
- [poem temporarily removed by author]
- Singing Bowl
- [temporarily removed by author]
- Risen
- Refrain
- [poem temporarily hidden by author]
- Dear heart, I take up my tasks again:
- [poem temporarily hidden by author]
- The Beloved Asks
- Risk
- Vocalise
- Tremolo
- Interior Landscape, with Roman Shades and Lovers
- Bird Looking One Way, Then Another
- Gypsy Heart
- Like the Warbler
- Landscape with Carillon
- Letter to Ardor
- Landscape, with Salt and Rain at Dawn
- Marks
- Landscape, with Sunlight and Bits of Clay
- Slaying the Beast
- Measures
- In a Hotel Lobby, near Midnight
- Landscape with Shades of Red
- Between the Acts
- Letter to Duty
- Letter to Nostalgia
- You
- Song of Work
- Balm
- Landscape, with Wind and Tulip Tree
- From the Leaves of the Night Notebook
- Letter to What Must be Borne
- Redolence
- Letter to Myself, Reading a Letter
- Night-leaf Tarot
- Trauermantel
- Foretelling
- Aubade, with Sparrow
- Reverie
- Mineral Song
- Layers
- Prayer
- Proof
- Landscape as Elegy for the Unspent
How do I know you/have returned?/…Most of all that tendril of clear/uncertainty: knowing what could be lost.
WHAT COULD BE LOST?
When you returned, your children told stories to each other again:
Remember when you’d throw us up into the air and land on waves
bigger than mountains? Remember how you’d swim to us laughing
and we would cough up brine and yell: that’s not funny, you know.
Remember where you left the chocolate bars for noche buena and
how they’d melted underneath Mom’s pillow, and O, you laughed!
Remember why we hid the goat that was to grace your birthday,
and you laughed that we saved a life on your birthday? Billy. Billy.
Billy, we called out for him feigning ignorance of a coy conspiracy.
Like spring, if it never comes, there would be no laughter coming
from that corner where your rocking chair remains empty. Sundown
would bring some such uncertain question murmured: Remember?
When you returned, I knew what I had lost. Like an absent spring.
Luisa: Without slighting any of your amazing variations on MP, I must add my wow for this one. The neck ruff, lordly arrogance, the whetting of sharps and the gunpower pollen: all so nicely suggest Romeo and Juliet, with modern weapons but perhaps the same ending.
Heavens I love the gunpowder pollen. That’s one sure indicator of a poem’s power: does it change the way you see.
Thanks so much, Julie. :)
Beautiful, I am wordless Luisa.
Thanks to you too, Uma.