September 5, 2012

The clear sky lightens upward, from a gray getting paler to the deeper cobalt of the night lingering.  Hot and humid, the air hangs still and not even the birds are awake yet.  The bus for the high school has come and gone, empty seats mostly only a few students dozing against the windows.  The first thing I heard this morning was the person who delivers the newspaper, the throbbing sound of the truck accelerating and decelerating up the road, the turn around at the dead end, and coming back, the paper hitting the ground outside, and sliding to a stop, then the truck  rounding the corner and the sound fades over to the next block.  The silhouettes of the leaves obscure most of the sky, the cane looking like impossibly tall skinny corn against the gray.

In the background of my morning are coffee and toast, the news, the daily sounds . . . and we want these quiet mornings to continue just the way they are . . .

Love Poem With Toast

Some of what we do, we do
to make things happen,
the alarm to wake us up, the coffee to perc,
the car to start.
The rest of what we do, we do
trying to keep something from doing something,
the skin from aging, the hoe from rusting,
the truth from getting out.
With yes and no like the poles of a battery
powering our passage through the days,
we move, as we call it, forward,
wanting to be wanted,
wanting not to lose the rain forest,
wanting the water to boil,
wanting not to have cancer,
wanting to be home by dark,
wanting not to run out of gas,
as each of us wants the other
watching at the end,
as both want not to leave the other alone,
as wanting to love beyond this meat and bone,
we gaze across breakfast and pretend.

Miller Williams

We pretend every day will be like this, that the ordinary things will just go on and on.  Some days that's all we can ask for and all we need!