18 Haiku

Grey wet plop plop plops
Not so bad... except, look up---
I can't find the sun!

I don't hear the wind
I look & see quiet trees
But the heat is out.

Cavemen built fires
Out of the wind. They survived.
Modern man doesn't know.

I light the pilot.
Heat roars. Ten minutes later
it's out again. Rats.

I watch the greyness
Spirit slumps. I'd rather dance
On the tips of leaves.

In a drop of dew
In the sunlight, what is seen?
Who dances there? Do I?

Light is sometimes
Only inside looking out.
Blink but remember.

Do you know that place?
The one where sun shines always?
I come from there.

Hiding in a tent
Sheet over table, hidden,
I look out to sea.

The captain hails me.
I spring up, I run outside
And swim out from shore.

The boat picks me up
We sail off. Australia!
Goodbye England.

Old memories don't die.
They linger, like lamps in fog
Lighting the way home.

Spider webs, rocks,
A path I know by heart.
Walking is easy.

Sometimes the hard part
Is to go on to new places,
Let go, don't look back.

We don't have one life.
We have many, but no memories.
Just that tugging, here.

Do you feel it now?
Does it speak to you inside?
I hear it, yes.

To light a lantern
Is to remember the light
Inside. Forget rain.

I dance on the head
Of a pin, endlessly full
Of joy, remembering.

April 4, 2010

Time

November 1, 2009

6:21 pm
Time has a funny way of twisting around. I sit here in my bedroom and I am in a timeless place. No breath of wind comes through the open window. Outside, the late day sun highlights a pink wall a block away. Two parking lots lie in pine tree shade. It must be at least 80 degrees inside. I hear only the constant whir of my cool mist humidifier and occasional scratching as it swallows bits of microscopic debris. My floor fan is on, but drowned out by the humidifier. I could be 12 or 90 years old. I could be in another time and place entirely, somewhere else, staring out a window at day’s end, remembering, wondering…

Time doesn’t matter here. What I remember, what I wonder, are thoughts best held close to my heart. To let them out, even for a second, out of this timeless place, is to risk losing them. So I sit here. I remember.

It’s funny how things keep repeating themselves. I read my diaries earlier today, and heard a relative acting and saying the same things seven years ago as he says now, the same things as he said when I was 13, when he held the power.

Why do these things matter? It’s never easy, this being a family. It’s so much easier to go to work and solve problems there. People don’t get angry so much. Maybe that’s why I like this room, with the view. The sun lights only a wisp of pink wall now. Soon all will be pine tree twilight.

I can pretend here. I can pretend I too am timeless. This lifetime or another, what does it matter? Sitting here looking, I need do nothing. It’s the doing that is hard. Going out there and opening my mouth, doing what I think is helpful only to learn how differently another sees me. I am safe here in this room. No one can reach me here. I haven’t failed anyone, including myself, because here I can sit unseen, yet see.

I read of others who go out into the world and do and do and do. But I am cursed — or blessed, depending – with that part of me that stands aside and sees and hears in a different way. Sometimes I try to speak of it, but inevitably I choose the wrong words, and my listener does not understand. Sometimes I wonder, why try?

Try telling that to the sun or the moon or the stars! They just are. So, too, I suppose am I… It’s the getting from here to there that’s the hard thing.

The sun is gone now, but tomorrow it will rise again. And I will go out my door, back into the world.