Marvelous Things without Number
       

After forty or so summers you kind of get
the idea: the slow deepening of the plum-blue dusk
that offers a backdrop for the stately silhouettes
of disconsolate, sentinel-like telephone poles;
the fading chorus of evening birdsong; the sharp hollow
pong of an aluminum bat making contact
with the ball somewhere off in the distance followed by
the joyful and at the same time somehow mildly
forlorn minor uproar of a clutch of children cheering;
eventless days at the beach, the scorched sand
stinging beneath your feet, the sand in
your clothes and your hair, a relentless ubiquitous
grit that remains undislodged after any
number of showers and shampooings; the familiar
dirt that collects underneath your fingernails
and your hair growing longer; careless
afternoons endured and discharged in the backyard
hammock or a languid folding chair by the lake,
reading Amy Clampitt, reading Rilke;
teenagers playing an eternal game
of Monopoly or Risk that might well be
the very same game they started last summer;
the same hummingbirds taking the same flight paths
back to endless empty abundance
of the same backyard flowers and feeders...
Some friends are renewing their vows, they were married
a decade ago. Some friends are driving
up to one of the casinos on Friday
to hear a tribute band who have modeled themselves
after Led Zeppelin or Journey.
A friend who left for the East Coast two years
ago has flown back to Chico to take photos
of Mount Lassen exactly one hundred years after
its catastrophic eruption. For a while
it feels as if everything is a reenactment
of something that has already happened: even dumping
a skitter of Raisin Bran into a bowl
and then pouring milk over it, or sitting
on the porch or trying on sneakers takes on
the aura of a ritual. Are you trying
to deny time and change, to say that death
will have no authority here, or are you
celebrating the fact that everything is
in flux and ungraspable, or is the season
doing one or the other of these things for you?
Mornings glow like dreams, like memories, with
a radiance that has been lying latent
in the earth all night, you can do it again
(whatever it is) but you know that you can't do it over:
the beautiful girl, kissed, can't be unkissed
(and who would want that anyway? But
you might), and so you repeat, repeat,
repeat, feeling rich with existence and time
and a kind of exhaustion you have learned to savor;
the end of Side B, after all, simply means
that you flip the record over and listen
to Side A again. And did you say that life
would always be this way, or were you told that
by someone in the past, and now hang on to that belief
in the face of what must be mounting but, for now,
still invisible evidence to the contrary?
Stay invisible, you say to it, stay, you whisper,
stay just as you are, just a little bit longer,
which is just another way of telling the story
you tell the children every night, how the birds
and the rivers remembered the songs even when
the people forgot, and how, when the people
regained the ability to remember,
they learned the songs again from the birds
and the rivers. The children's wide, trusting eyes
as you say this, as if what you said was, to use
that phrase we used to like to use, the gospel truth.
It's only a story, after all. You mean
no harm. No one means any harm. The world
is ancient, full of shades and spirits, not all of them
friendly, and we do with it what we can.

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Copyright © 2020 Troy Jollimore All rights reserved
from Copper Nickel
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission