The Unresolved

Humming with a heavy heart.

I’ve lost the pencil you gave me.
It wouldn’t be the first time, but
I just don’t think with it any more,
I’m not the mind I used to be
with it. I live by fresh white pages,
trying to find poetry in packed buses,
ketchup stains on a white sweater.

I just don’t feel with it any more.
I’ve even tried on those nights
when the slightest sound in the street
brings back all the counted sheep,
and in slits of bits of sleep I pass
the drowsing litter of lines.
I pass dreams that never complete.

Sometimes I simply live for those
nightly interstices, dream-lit corridors...
I remember once I took your hand
knowing that none of us chose
to be afraid, none of us chose to wait.
But your palm too became a leaf,
yellowing when first autumn touched it.

Perhaps because I keep returning
to mornings of cereal and symmetry,
spend my days counting the last bills,
sometimes, perhaps, too lost in them?
Still my fingers trace the geometry
of your face, we smile, hold hands, and wait—
wait for the sun to be the tree’s diadem.

The wholeness of a day perhaps comes
with debts of pieces of the next.
And so autumn has showered on me
my shreds of countless poems,
and so I have learned to live
by blank white pages, lost pencils,
and last night’s fractured sleep.



Symphony
October 22, '11

For Rawdhah on her birthday.