To Waiting
All morning by the highway
I waited.
The day was a string with
the bead of you swinging
amber and whole at its end.
Dust lifted my hair;
dust was the way the wind
found its fingers
there where I dreamed the fall
of your hair over me--
a wave, a sigh, a landslide,
the soft brown roots
of not one tree
but a fern-tangled forest;
I waited for this
without caring how long,
alive as a vine that covers
a dying barn, as an apple tree
whose apples are flowers,
rose-white in clouds;
as the bud on the cane
hides the thorn in the rose
as the rose abides
in the round hip I gave
to soften the ground
each time we'd wait
for breath to come back
from that place
in the dark where
the storm rides.
~June 2015
posted for real toads
Sunday Mini-Challenge: Ode to the Quotidian
Karin Gustafson (ManicDDaily) offers us the example of the sublime Neruda and his odes to everyday things as a springboard, but as always leaves us some breathing room to slip in something else. This is something else, as I usually think of an ode as something a bit more full of the blood sweat and tears of form than this--still, what could be more quotidian than waiting?
Image: Apple Tree, I , 1912, by Gustav Klimt
Public domain
via wikiart.org
