Ending

Happy Spring! I was looking through poems to post about spring. Technically, the first day of spring, the vernal equinox, is the start of the year according to the astronomical calendar. It’s another moment we get to sort of ‘take stock,’ in what we want to continue to ‘let in,’ and what we want to continue to ‘let go of.’ It’s the cycle of beginnings and endings. Often when my client’s are going through really difficult times, I remind them that life is often like the seasons and we forget. The seeds we had no idea were getting planted did, last autumn. We had to go through the darkness, the coldness, often the lonely season of winter, and one day we realize the sun is getting warmer, there’s a bud, a bird has returned. We went through that cold, lonely season forgetting on the other side, ‘there’s always a spring.’ We forget that life is much like the seasons. I tell them this, in their darker times, to remind them that the sun has come out, the flowers have bloomed, many times when we thought they would not. Sometimes spring takes a bit longer to find us. Some years it comes earlier than expected. It’s the story of life. Being a Pisces, it’s sad to see Pisces season end, but I’m an Aries rising sign, so I have an affinity for Aries season as well. As I was searching for a poem, I found this poem. I’ve always been attracted to it. I have no idea why. It’s the last poem of the second collection of poems I wrote called, “A Little Eden.” It’s one of those poems, that I feel like I didn’t write. Each time I read it, I read it differently, as if I didn’t write it. It has many meanings to me embedded within it. One is, overall, it feels, to me, like, if nothing else, it’s about ‘endings,’ which always involves ‘beginnings.’ The two could not exist without the other. So, on this day of beginnings, which also marks an ‘ending.’ I give you this poem that, to me, feels a bit like both, probably because they are so entangled it’s hard to separate them. Also, if today does not feel like your spring, be patient, all things come as planned.

Ending

The suicidal elm was not a metaphor.
The dusk river, it meant nothing.
The skin of melons, the subtlety
of sun and shadow’s role in the the opening of petals
we did not consider. The raven
and the indistinct silhouette they say they saw, was seen,
and we held no omens.
Time was not granite rivers
& heat and dust were more than science
when they played guitars
and composed songs about women with black hair
that contained symbolic importance
not like lotus flowers or Easter lillies.
There were rain clouds before we even dreamed of opening up.
There were edges before we ever dreamed of borders.
Geometry is a private terrain,
both moon and crackhouse.
I guess we both knew how light ash is
before you and I ever were,
that’s not to call attention to the wind
or say that you need air
to see how oblivion and nothingness feels
when you’re moving,
to see how much weight objects hold
when you pack the photograph last,
as if the order of how you choose to hold on to things
says something about whether it’s a sunset in your suitcase
or a kiss on a rainy night.
As if romance wasn’t something on your mind.
As if what she said in your ear as she paid the cab driver
was just another moth
in a world full of butterflies,
who will never stop feeling like moths..