when the light, late in the afternoon, pauses

My last apple eaten was an after-school snack in 11th grade. There was the breathlessness of dancing, flinging my body repeatedly over and across the shaggy orange carpet of my parent’s basement and the subsequent grabbing of the apple I had left waiting for me on the surface of their wooden entertainment center. I ate and my throat swelled its disapproval. The threat of strangling from the inside scared me away from apples for the next six years.

My ultra-recent revelation: I can eat apple meat as long as I skip the peel. Today I plucked apples from rows of trees illuminated by the autumn day and sunk my teeth into the taste of juicy content that’s been contained inside a high school memory for too long. It devoured me.

a light growth of green dreams drying

I followed the rain drops along the uniquely dusk-colored handrail up to the porch elevated enough to overlook the street and entered into the greenery haven: a porch perfected with complementary walls of vines and twisting leaves caressing its boundaries. I looked around and breathed, a sneak gratefulness for walking in the steps of the people who lived here and pretending this space was mine—the shocks of flower, the bamboo chair, the rain dripping over the green netting and cooling the day.

Then I knocked because I came there to knock and waited. The old man with the look of utterness opened the door and smiled his confused old man smile.

I handed him his lunch with a pressing desire to ensure that someone would enjoy this day from the green space where I stood. “Do you ever eat your lunch out here on the porch?” I asked.

“Well I was sitting out on the porch but I came inside because it started raining.”

“Wouldn’t it be so nice to sit out here with the rain and eat your lunch?” I felt like a somewhat sales person with no clear profit goal.

His eyes got surprisingly big. “You know,” he spoke in wonderment, “All my life I’ve been eating my lunch in the kitchen. You’ve really given me something to think about. Maybe I’ll do that someday.”

And when I left, I’m sure the old man walked slowly back to his kitchen and left the porch begging to be sat on empty, and I walked back to a car hoping that words carry potential for change.

it’s only fallen frames, they told me

After driving to the store to acquire my mom’s requested milk and onions, I pulled to the parking lot’s exit and, giving into an explosive need to break free that was jittering like too much coffee inside of me, I turned onto the street away from the direction of my destination.

A few sporadically chosen turns, and I found myself driving fast through the long, curvy road of the Bedford metroparks, the woodsy haven in the middle of the over-developed suburb where I spent much of my growing-up life wondering around. The trees grew into my road roof that filtered the bright Sunday afternoon sun into granting my body a rare chance to press pedals that propel me effortlessly fast.

The kind of autumn day you dream about.

Driving past all the people walkingrunningjoggingstretchingbiking in herds or alone, I felt crisp cool breezes and listened to sullenly hopeful speaker projections, moving and moving until an end. The end arrived with the sight of an opening that led into Tinker’s Creek, the place where my grandma brought me on young summer days. Once she instructed me to collect rocks that we took into Sunday school the next day and painted. I had painted a bird on mine.

Here, on this starkly unaverage day, I pulled the car next to the creek and watched a moment the woman with her hand tucked safely inside the man’s elbow, together wondering through each other’s company in the form of a grassy space with no destination. The look of content from a distance.

Then I ripped my shoes into shreds and ran to the stream, plodding into the cool water to collect the perfect rock, painted it with poetry and threw it into the sky, called it ebenezer to immortalize the autumn day and the falling away from things I’ve known and the necessary death of some parts of me to allow the experience of rebirth.

It’s mostly about rebirth.

meeting the coast of maine

I watch waves larger than my eyes know crash into themselves and send their spray in the air like a father tossing a gleeful small child up and up when he comes home from work. The child goes airborne and explodes, flies, spews parts in all directions, crashes deathly to jagged ground. Too much power.

Wondering the rocky coast line, words drift on wet air from a bystander: “The ocean is so powerful…  God is amazing.”  Necessary abandonment of these words to get closer to what the water is.

I plant myself and sprout slowly from a rock overhang jutting out in a manner reminiscent of the opening Simba scene in The Lion King. The spray could devour my dangling feet if it reached with a slightly greater effort. Thought streams something like:

the need to give the ocean the credit she deserves for her tantalizing dance with the rocks that scrape her body’s outlines instead of condensing her into the word God which finds more over-use and consequent haze than the words love or starving or beautiful. But where the words? There is water there is rock there is me there are other people there is an overwhelming something greater somewhere somewhere somewhere and never right words for all the combinations of how we many meet, collide, create something like living to not be said. Hereupon helpless i utter lilac shrieks and scarlet bellowings and become only further indebted to the ocean because her waves’ melodrama drowns my sound.

An old man standing near turns to my friend, says of me, “Must be meditating.”
“More likely writing poetry in her head,” the words from a friend who read my moment well.

The old man laughed out loud at a something real he considered a joke, a sound that couldn’t carry to my ears over the more pressing although less formed perceptions of an ocean’s handshake.

wondering a summer day

The land took a steep turn downward through the woods. “We’re going down,” I said over my shoulder to a friend who was clearly hesitant about the truth of this statement.

“I’m dizzy just looking down there,” she said.

We went anyways.

We half-walked-half-slid-down through the non-path in the woods that wasen’t quite tamed for traveling, through the tree-sheilded land of lost kickballs, overunderaround fallen trees and piles of dead leaves and a trickle of stream. My unconfident friend in tow, I tried to feel some kind of certain that the nonexistent path I was creating would carry us somewhere worth going.

Such unassuming walks usually do.

Finally, after pushing through bushes, coming face to face with a clearing who acquainted me with knowing the vastness of sky which life’s movements had recently concealed, and climbing up tree-root-ladders, we spotted a picnic table in the midst of the trees: a signal of abandoned once-life.

As we sat on the table to recover from the journey with unknown purpose, a through-the-trees gaze taught us the nearness of the river.

We sat with the trees and the sight of water so surprisingly ours and said simultaneous phrases to make poetry, wrote the words on rocks, and left them to mark the place where everything had led.

summer standing still

 

 

 

 

 I walked in on new summer when she wasn’t
expecting me:

just as she woke in the morning with a hint of drool still sticking to her chin while her face glowed radiant, refreshed by sleep. She was in her element, envisioning no audience:

I paused to watch her through the kitchened chaotic remnants of a last night’s toying with life’s movements, where two glass doors stretched like arms open wide to embrace me from across the room, framing summer’s substance:

on a back porch, old speakers stacked projecting lighthearted tunes in the ears of two porch inhabitants:

one a skinny boy with scruffed curly hair slouched like comfort in a wicker chair, legs crossed, shirtlessly wearing decaying brown corduroy cut-offs. And the other a skinny boy with tousled blond hair that speaks of inattention, blue cut-offs hanging from his waist, leaning purposefully careless along the doorway’s side, and eating an apple.

I saw backs:

faces were directed silently to the same uneventful place:

green. Green of every possible shape and size growing from stems or branches covering the back yard’s wooden fence. They watched it captivated like a movie. More green than the eyes still stuck in spring could understand. And to the right, bright red growing from a bush. The scene frozen in sun-filled warmth:

the stacked speakers, the skinny boys, the apple, green, the red:

summer arrived.