Teapot World, June – the places of past love

 

1. charlie on the bridge

You were always there,

One tilt away, an angle, a thin veil

Which kept me

In shadows that I mistook

For momentary need,

An anxious doing

To pretend

I wasn’t waiting,

Like chatter while you wait

For the teapot’s warm water

To flavor,

Except I didn’t know:

The gathering can be slow.



Maybe it was that slowness

That I mistook

For hopeless-ed hope,

The kind you read and hear

In Broadway musicals

And bathroom walls

And pop-up adds

And pop-in tunes

And bitter books that

Hide the bitterness in

Stories faraway:

The tea was always gathering, here,

Not lost in fictions, always there.



Our eyes were not enough,

Their meeting, yours and mine,

Nor that feeling first

Or that first kissing, loosing

One veil for another.

But that night, whole,

After you left –

A lifetime ago,

With bitter words

That hid love, pouring its gathering

Into shadows –

How strange the un-tilting now,

My sipping through the tilt somehow.



Late on a quiet moonlit stroll:

There, within the water, real,

Of a familiar, real stream,

The long, elegant lines

Of a long, elegant egret, white and gray,

Peered in slowest movements out

From beneath a familiar bridge.

The night was warm; the moon, orange-delicious.

I whispered your name, Cyril, to him: he

Stepped into a patch of light on the water,

And searched back

For my figure on the bridge above.

Between, our gathering gaze un-angled not love,



Not hopeless-ed hope,

Not me, not us, not dreams

Or any story faraway,

But something more

That had gathered in silence,

Flavoring itself

Like the flower tea in the reflecting pot

On the table in front of me now:

A silent absence, shimmering, the

Belonging to you that never left me, and never leaves.

Still, sometimes,

You tilt away, angle wrong, veil thin,

Unaware of its gathering within.




2. cyril, beneath the bridge

Reach, step, look there,

Look there – sometimes,

Looking for a piece of green,

A smaller fish,

Something in the stream –

But sometimes not.



Sometimes I’m only here,

Where I belong, this spot

On the river, divided

Into two parts by a hard cement wall.

It’s a human thing, we know,

The ducks and I, the wall,

That would make a story, a beginning,

And an end.



Sometimes I go the other way,

Stepping across from the end to the beginning

Or simply here in the middle, they call it, to

A cool place, safe, blown

Soft and cool by the north wind sweeping down

Into this easy moment that

Never ends. I

Thank them for that, people,

For making this here and

Letting it be, where

I’ve always returned,

Because I belong, or where she returns,

Because she belongs.



Sometimes I hear a voice, human – we

Can tell the difference, you know.

Voices are not the same, at all.

She calls me, I can tell:

Her timber, the same pattern of

Waved air reaching in. I stretch and turn my head

To the bridge near,

To see her in this eye, or this,

Watch,

Wait,

Begin,

End,

End again to

Begin –

She has something in her voice

That reaches, like me.



I don’t step away but remain

Part of the light reflecting off the water,

Part of the cool in the breeze,

Part of my own silence,

Part of her whispering, again,

My name.




3. june, the teapot’s point of view

…living. I do not

Live, do I? Resting,

Waiting, nothing motivated –

I am so very patient, it might seem:

But only seem. In truth,

It is time I lack, nothing

More. Yet

Here I speak,

As if I were

Living. Oh-ho!



Charlie makes so much of what was,

For her, for what is,

I can tell, you know: I hear it.

I hear more than you do

For I do not have to do – anything.

You’d be surprised: everything

Is silent, everything that

For you is loud

And hard and soft and crackly and sharp and round and sweet and stale and rich and full and filled and distraught and smiling and hoping and dancing and, oh-ho,

It is silent, only.



I have memory as well,

Yes, the different hands

That have held me, hold me still,

The different scents of different dry leaves

Giving forth and blending flavors,

All of them, all of them,

All of them – are still here.

I belong here, as they,

You would say – but I am beyond

Or behind, belonging –

I have no belief.



Oh-ho, you cannot know,

You things alive, so mixed with

A then that you cannot hear

Is now, a tomorrow

That you cannot believe,

Is now. I do not envy you –

I do not envy or desire or laugh or, or

Tell stories to ease

A broken heart, or contain

A fear. Still, I

So very much, sometimes,

Need.