Melancholy

A recent always well written and always insightful post from one of my favorite bloggers, Skinny Little Blonde, converged with tonight's Big Yellow writing prompt and the result is a poem yet again about the power of love and the challenges that the triplets of time, place and circumstance can present.

Melancholy

How far is too far?
Sometimes, after midnight,
I stretch my fingers so they extend like perfect pencils
And I try to imagine that in the act of drawing lines and circles
I can span the distance and straighten fate
Like red hot steel,
So that it curves around your driveway
Instead of around our destinies.
.
I’m not complaining, you know.
How lucky can a person be to
Live with a heart that deepens and expands
Through this connection that
Despite every outage and short circuit
Sparks its way into distant light
And guides and replenishes
The little chair by the door.
.
I will never complain.
I learn to wait.
It’s a winding train
On its way to fate.
.
There will be times when fate vacations
And so will we.
There will be times when we forget altogether
And pass the sugar only to chuckle
That we’ve forgotten that even with extra wooden slats
there’s not a kitchen table in the universe
that can extend that far.
.
And there will be a time, or two, when the phone rings
Probably before sunrise
And as the receiver lies flat
One of us is on a plane,
Not to rejoice but to rejoin.
When my daughter was little
I thought about the end of the world
And I wondered if I could reach her
In time.
Or I wondered who I would race to
If there were only seconds before the desert island
Closed shut.

I didn’t know then that I would ask these questions
For all of my life.
I didn’t know then that
I will one day close my eyes,
And so will you,
And hope that in that moment
We have one last riotous laugh.

I didn’t know that loving you,
Or anybody of great importance,
For that matter,
Meant that life would then be lived
In a certain absentia.
Not less full or wonderous,
Not less engaged or enigmatic
But a little like the melancholy
Of a dark sky missing one star.
It’s only one star,
One among thousands,
But in the great scheme of things.
It’s a black hole with neon flashes.
.
We own this sky.
It’s me and you
Finding our way.
It’s me and you and everything.