My Futures Wheel and Fan like Evening Birds
Judy Gahagan
Beyond the last hairpin I come to a line
of twisted olive trees;
they show the devastation of their interminable lives
full-frontally to the road;
many of their patriarchal trunks are split four ways from the roots
and hollowed out
by some grief there’s no more point in hiding.
All eyes they are, begging by the road.
I eye them too
on days like a beggar, cavernous inside,
on those days a caravanserai of life
seems to have passed on by, like a mirage on a wind-plagued desert,
and there’s little, nothing, to show of it.
But I’ve seen
these ancients go on fruiting
(if you can call their black and bitter berries fruit).
Today blossoms
in that time before they fruit:
the whole grove, young and old alike, from here is mingling
in a single canopy of flowering:
the faint green lace trembles under silver leaves
as the wind pours through.
The buds, flowers, fruit spring out of these ancient ruins,
year after year.
And seeing that
this morning is a pristine page rinsed clean
of memory and of baggage;
another morning for beginning; I begin again enrolled in the beginner’s
class,
expectant, green.
not in-grown thick with roots or certainty,
with collections housed in velvet,
progeny who return as if I were a Holy mountain.
Today my futures wheel and fan like evening birds.
[from Ambit 164]
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