week 241 ~ I’m beginning to live with future tense

I’m beginning to live with future tense
once more expanding my conjugations
to will and shall and verbs like hope the ones
I’ve been afraid to say out loud no sense
tempting the subjunctive when a sequence
of events in future perfect beckons
besieged still by emotional demons
I wobble precariously the pretense
of the conditional implying that
the ground could give way any minute and
I’d be plummeting through the past again
insecure disillusioned railing at
imperfect while trying to stop and stand
on the crust of could-be despite was-then

May 22, 2013

Imagine my amazement to find this rare beauty blooming in my constantly surprising shade garden. Remembered from deep woodland idylls as a child, Jack-in-the-pulpit graced stream banks and thickets as I roamed the shady neverland adventuring. How lovely that it has found me here.

May 21, 2013

In front of my house a patch of iris are starting to bloom. My imagination runs ahead to envision what it will look like with 100+ blossoms in their full glory, and then I return to the present moment and admire the dark red buds and budding blooms amid the purple flowers. Process can be lovely, as well as the final result. This changing vista will delight me for many days to come.

May 20, 2013

After breakfast I play music, instead of racing off to school. Time slows and I feel my focus turning back to my own life, to all the postponed projects. Not to begin them yet, I need some down time to reclaim my equilibrium. But like the iris budding in the small garden next to my front walk, I am storing up the energy of release, knowing that soon it will be time for my plans to blossom.

May 19, 2013

I work most of the day, and finally in the evening the awaited moment– grades are calculated and posted, and my spring semester courses are truly over. Already I feel waiting responsibilities for the future pressing in, but that’s the life I have chosen for myself. Now however, at least for a few days, I can make my own schedule and prioritize my tasks according to my sense of value, not an externally imposed necessity. So I allow myself a brief “hooray!”

May 18, 2013

I leave the house early and drive to school for graduation. So many hours of patience is required to get through the pageantry each year, but we honor accomplishment with ceremony, so I hang in. It’s lovely to see the students so happy, and the weather cooperates in their cheerful farewells. Arriving home I find the hedge on one side of my new home overflowing w/ white blossoms that somehow appeared overnight. Like the graduates, lovely in their profusion and full of cheer.

May 17, 2013

I ditch my chores when I get my friend’s text and we escape together to the sea. The soul usually knows what it needs, and I feel the heaviness of expectations lift a little in the wind blowing to shore from distant lands. Lovely to have sand in my shoes again.

May 16, 2013

Lilacs– heavenly fragrance and lovely lavender color. If I had to pick just one favorite flower– which luckily I don’t, as we can all love as many blossoms as we can stuff into our memories– it would have to be this one. Poets through the ages have agreed, and New Englanders too have been planting them since our forebears first arrived. Sometime in the midst of a wood you will come across a lilac bush, all that’s left to mark a long-gone homesite. I do have some at my new place, though they appear to be a hybrid as they are still tightly budded up. But the regular, hardy, famous perennial is blooming away all over my neighborhood, and its delicate scent flavors my daily walks.

week 240 ~ the time before everything that has been

the time before everything that has been
wrapped in the scent of phlox and sound of rain
on the pavement of my heart before pain
dug ruts for rivulets of tears begin
stretched out on the grass watching ants scurry
by or jumping off the shed roof into
the waiting branches of the big spruce who
could eat their ice cream cone slowest not me
but I tried back in those lost summer days
of sunshine memories melting kool-aid
popsicles when I was never afraid
when happiness blossomed so many ways
easily beautifully without regret
before the time of so much to forget

May 15, 2013

The dogwoods are in bloom. and though I don’t have one myself at my new house, there are several in my neighborhood– hooray! When I was growing up there was a dogwood tree in my backyard, and spring is somehow not complete w/out stopping a moment to contemplate these magnificent blossoms swaying in the breeze.