How long has it been, little invisible blog of mine?

A couple of years that were actually dog years. Everything feels different.

*****

Marguerite 

We have become old people,

us kids, remaining.

Somewhere, in the bones that suddenly cry out

then stop, is a folded sense of sense.

Sense folded up in layered, rolled sheaths -

- brittling palimpsest of selfhood.

Our neighbor's son is also an old person. His mother: much older.

He is a raving maniac and he chased her and she fell and her femur snapped.

And this is not good. Not a metaphor.

She was a walker, striding brightly through the neighborhood, to the rose garden

and back.

She won't be striding anymore.

The sidewalks will do without her.

Kids these days. 60 year old kids these days, raving and failing to have ever left home.

And so angry about that.  

The writing that was vivid on my bones

leeches out into my blue veins.

And still I dream that I have - have always had -  two houses. 

Here it is again, my other house, with the beds just as we left them.

Her purse still left there, spilled open - the menthol cigarettes, the felt pens, and lip gloss -

just as it was when we missed the plane.

As if, in some rooms, time has stopped.

It is the other house - my actual house? - in which the crazy man wandered.
Or the house next door?

Which room does the dream make? And why?

Marguerite lies today in a bed of light oblivion, 

she may never stand again

and yet may still fall 

to sterile ground, searching down the cold corridor 

for the felt quality of light

that once emanated from the heart

of one her one good son.