On hair strands and Indian summer… a poem of sorts…

They stood on the window sill like sentinels,

a pair of bottles, untouched.

“For curly hair” they said, sunlit and resolute.

Never one to heed a label,

I gave one a squeeze, recently,

breaking its shrine-like aura,

washing my uncurly tresses, remembering

the smell of his hair,

how it felt to run my fingers

through their length;

what it felt like from the inside out,

in awe of an emotion I thought

I’d long forgotten how to feel.

The other day,

I found a stray hair of his

resting on the shoulder of a sweater.

It had been a long winter

and I may have worn it

during our last days together,

or the hair may have fallen, unnoticed,

during one of his forays

into the depths of the closet,

migrating of its own accord,

like a lone camel scaling desert dunes.

Strange how something so innocuous

can bring back so many moments,

carefully encapsulated in memory

and not held at it’s edge

for easy access, but deep, until triggered;

then there it is-remembrance,

with all of the good and the bad of it,

its power slowly relinquishing its hold

on my heart and spirit, leaving behind

a sort of dispassionate, clinical registration,

awareness of the passage of time

and emotion, shifting like the sunlight

creeping through my window and across the walls

on this Indian summer day.

Today – free form poem of sorts

Silence broken by

the hushed hum of the fridge,

the shrill whine of a circular saw splitting wood,

the occasional sounding of a car horn.

In French it’s called klaxon

and it makes me giggle a little.

I’m tired and feel slightly off,

like barely curdled milk or overripe fruit

with the pip splitting open from the centre out.

My insides are roiling in protest at the one too many

scoops of hot salsa or the extra glass of rosé I shouldn’t have had,

or something else that I just haven’t quite figured out.

A nondescript bug.

I feel I’ve accomplished much, though, these last few weeks.

Sorting and organizing always cheers me;

it recategorizes possibilities,

resets my creativity button,

invigorates.

I’m finding I have a lot of stuff I don’t use anymore,

things I thought essential to my creative process

which now merely clutter up the pipeline.

I’m plugging away slowly at unplugging.

Seems my body is mirroring the process.

And now to rest,

as the sound of a plane engine

scrapes across the sky.