Waiting for a word

Link to YouTube: "Waiting for a word"

Waiting for a word

I had dumped the last of the ice cubes from my glass into the sink

and turned away from where you were sitting

by the counter with a book of poems by Robert Frost.

I was half-way down the alley before I realized

just what I had said –

or hadn’t quite said.

But then I didn’t turn back to you -

so how important could those

slightly revised words on the tip of my tongue have been,

anyway …

and then I realized that I had simply forgotten

just what you had said,

in the first place –

or I.

And so as I walked, I crossed cracks in the pavement

and spotted graffiti on the brick walls.

I wondered if what we had said to each other

about poetry or anything had even mattered at all.

So often our voices seem more like background noise–

music that we don’t really even hear.

It seemed to me as I wandered among the clutter of the alleyway

as if our words were mere flames of fire vanishing in bright sunlight.

Maybe my heart might nearly have caught hold of something real in the moment

and then, rushing forward instead, I extinguished your

words with my own noncombustibles.

Perhaps to hear poetry -

or even to hear each other - we might need to shut

everything else out.

What if we just closed our eyes

and leaned back,

arms crossed

over our hearts,

falling towards unseen arms with infinite slowness –

falling in bare hope into unknown emptiness –

falling into desolation -

or - perhaps - the soul of beauty.

Or perhaps we shall simply drown in more words.

There was a penny resting on a rough limestone rock

by the river where I had finally stopped walking away.

I sat alone in my own silence under the bridge,

the sounds of cars rolling and receding

over my head.

There was a gaggle of geese across the water.

One goose stretched out its wings,

flapped them out wide in the air several times

and then settled back down to look for bugs in the grass.

A little girl in a florescent pink shirt

ran down the path along the far side of barely rippling water.

I could see people strolling along

behind her – and a forest of trees, of course.

I stood and picked up the penny

and thought again of our forsaken words.

What waits for us in the silence?

What waits for us?