patrick's poem

TWO MOVEMENTS

(fall and winter)

1.

I catch myself, surprised
looking at the wall, expecting
to see a clock. I think of how
things move, or don't.
The chair in the kitchen, caught
in the new fall light is as empty
as it could be: bodies, voices
gone from it, a coat of dust.

The clock is where it always is but
for a moment it is me who is somewhere else--
another house, another wall with another clock,
time beating away the years between.
It doesn't matter if I know what time it is now
or if I did back then.

This wall holds as much meaning as another.
Time doesn't measure itself.
The chair is only meaningful when someone is in it.
This particular light, beautiful on the wall,
the chair, the dirty stove, comes only once
a year for a few days.

It is a real measurement,
as is the memory of that other wall, that other clock
but not the wall itself or the clock itself.

It is 11:48, I find, when I leave the kitchen,
meaning nothing.

2.

For all this love of solitude, standing
in the yard, late, a little drunk, the last
of the cosmos flowers waving in the breeze,
friends are as distant as these stars.

It is sometimes a stupid life, this keeping to oneself.

I have my reasons.

It is the absence of warmth,
not the cold air that seems more noticeable.
I sit down in the old adirondack rescued
from a friend's garden refuse, admire
the armrest that I made to mirror
the one that survived
the years in the rain and the hot sun,
cut from equally old stock, pulled from
the firewood stack,
as close as the original to dust.

It's good work. I rub my hand across
the sanded smooth, unfinished wood,
and from that vantage
view the good wreckage of my life:
a small light burning deep inside the house,
a sliver of moon in the misty air above,
the vapor of breathing escaping into the oncoming winter
this silence that saves me and kills me,
this loneliness I sometimes hold in place of fire.
And love it, and love it. And why not?
There is always the promise of fire.
It is not too much to ask to find joy
in the most difficult things.