Hooked

It is not because no one is home


that this thunder leaves me uneasy.


Rain chants its mantra of falling


no matter what comes to mind.


The rain dashes by like a cat, and the thunder


growls like a dog pulling on its chain.


Water moves, always wearing down,


dissolving anything in its way.


Me, I stay put. I could be a tree


how casually I wait for the light to come.


The thunder stutters now as if to say,


“Enough already.” A muffled squall


rages inside me. It rains here all the time.


The wind pushes the tears back into my eyes.


I open and close the dark window, open and close


the window because I need to breathe.


I groan in a dialect of thunder no one understands.


Like a drunk stumbling home, I bellow and bawl


until there is nothing to say, until I black out.


I am as hooked and mangled as Hemingway’s marlin.


This is what it is like to be old, to have nothing left to climb.


At the top of the tower, the ever turning light


makes a shadow out of anything in its way. Up or down


no longer matters. Once the water, heavy from its journey,


comes to rest, it returns to the purity of the sky.


This is the teaching of the rain, the meaning of our breath,


take in deeply what you may, but remember always to let go.

Breathe Deeply by M. D. Friedman CR 2010

Please see www.mdfriedman.com for more of M. D. Friedman’s art.

 

Copyright 2010 by M. D. Friedman.
Please visit www.mdfriedman.com to see more of M. D. Friedman’s work.

Memory Care

- for Anita

I heard some of you got your families living in cages tall and cold and some just stay there and dust away past the age of old. – Jimi Hendrix “Up From the Skies” (1968)

age breaks the cage
the canary
lingers

the boiled egg
of her mind cracks
open

day after
yellowed day
nothing stays

each morning she
rises to a
fresh world

smiles as she waits
for the shutter
to snap

plays out childhood
from vague finish
to start

she rides the glass slide
through the fogged
mirror