Taking
Time
I
stand solid now,
Not
like the moon in my twenties
Balloon
ideas tugging too taut
Slowly
my head turns
Taking
it all in
Feathers
fluffing with breath
Coming
down
Snow
floating on
A
navy blue night
I
am taking time-
it
can’t sneak up on me
anymore
A lot happened my fortieth year: unemployed>employed, divorced>remarried, Chico>Sebastopol. I'm used to moving, changing
jobs, even being married. What's new is relocating.
Such a deceptive, clinical term that connotes nothing of the dizzy, schizophrenic
sensations inherent to the reality.
Chico friends driving though the area stopped for coffee
with Dave and I at Aroma Roasters. “Do you miss Chico?” they asked. “No,” I
shot back immediately, “but I miss my friends.” It’s hard to miss a place that slammed
door after door in your face even if it offered some quality parting gifts like
a nice start to a teaching and music career.
Then I think of running up the North Rim trail months after
my divorce, stopping to sob with the sunset, and swimming in Bear Hole
with my father looking at fish
through goggles not knowing it would be the last time he would ever visit a
town where I live.
A new friend, actually a hybrid of the two worlds, shared
the stress of moving twice this last year before arriving at the perfect west
Sonoma County spot to create her art and house her husband’s extensive guitar
collection. Although the tension nearly snapped her into picking an old
fashioned bar fight, she asserted, “You have to keep moving on, or you’re not
really living.”
Here I'm slapped silent with beauty just walking to the
store up the crest of roller coaster hills. I buy my Charlie Brown Christmas
tree from a farm tucked between vineyards and orchards next to Tom Waits loading
up a ten-footer in his big black Suburban. Artists and musicians come here to
live as if it were a greener, holistic New York city, and I’m lining up with
them to pay slightly cheaper non-controlled rent.
The poem at the beginning of this entry came to me sometime
during the blur of a year; a stolen moment with a pen and back of a shopping
list. Against the grain of upheaval, a coming down, an assurance about the
decision to remarry, to relocate regardless of difficulty or doubt settled serenely and I had to write it down.
