The Things That Return - Diane LaRae Bodach

[Larry Robinson]

The Things That Return
 
I've been down this road a time or two.  I've seen the green
grass and the rabbits running and the deer
coming down from the hills to eat the last of the garden's harvest.
I've trained my eyes to catch the gold of sunset,
the silver moon rising, (the silver moon) rising over dry grass
the dry grasses and the leaves that swirl in gusts of surprise
when the tired stars open their eyes wide and dream in 4/4 time.
I've seen the frost slip in without so much as a peep
and leave us wondering where the warm days have fled,
where the warm nights have hunkered down beneath the earth.
Beneath the earth to wait out another winter.
I have closed my eyes and wondered too where the days have gone,
how the days and the nights and the stars of my dreams have blinked out
and left me standing here before that night as black
as the waiting shadow of death - inscrutable as my lover's eyes
the day he said he needed to leave because it was just too hard.
I've waited thinking everything comes around, everything
revolves like the sun and the moon and the tiny round seeds
of the dandelion that rise each spring in my morning garden.
But some things go and never come back.
My darling children's rooms stand empty still.
Empty of them and their yarn tied braids and their lithe
moon spirit bodies shining in their beds at midnight.
And no turnings of the moon's bright face smiling through
veiled windows bring back the tiny fingers and toes,
the endless songs of honeyed childhood soprano.
My love has not returned, not come round through the eternal
revolving door of love's spring scent blossoming pink on cherry boughs.
The things that return it seems are the truths that ring round our cabin doors
ring round our frost-pained windows with each new season of life.
Not the personal grasping for yesterday's love that lies darkening
the fallen leaf, but fresh new petals, a different shade of rose,
a silver hand opening that leads fall toward winter -
that sometimes startles with its clarity as the crisp cold descends,
as the bright leaves flee before it toward their dark beds.
 
	- Diane LaRae Bodach
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