Whispers in the Dark

(From yesterday)

I was going to be really early – now I’m just on time.

My own books of poetry whispered as I moved through the dark living room, called me once more to the recliner and just a few moments of pride. Poetry is reporting. Language – I’ve been considering lately, more likely deciding – is a great gift, a silly word putty to be played with and shaped, enjoyed as a powerful texture of the day – if given time and devotion. The opportunity to swap out one word for another, so, you know, to say it better, and as often move the reader from there to here. Simply with the choice of description – add a word so blue sky becomes pastel blue sky, take one away because we know, we feel and experience a truly loving look says it no better than the loving look. The loving is enough. And the exchange of words, how eating presents one picture and scarfing down another.

This, this opportunity to paint the day’s canvas with words and the thrill available in selection and choice and possibly plain old personal preference, this is what the poetry whispered as I moved robot-like through the dark. Come play with me, the poems called, and I did. Which is why I wasn’t early here.

Anyways, I find myself these last few days – off of looking at posts for musical instruments for sale on Facebook – wanting to plug my Squire tele into the amp and place my left-hand fingers into a place of pain playing sweet, jazzy chords, knowing it is me creating and sending off that music into the world even if it means starting the callous-on-the-fingertip thing all over again – again. And pulling open one of the chord instruction books to remind myself, again, what a G-sharp-major-7th looks like – what goes where. Because there’s the music and, I mean, it surely has to be a plus in the battle after all these decades of warding off alzheimer’s with some spell of out-of-the-ordinary brain activity. This finger….this fret….this note…ears to brain.

This alone, if nothing else, beyond the joy of cradling and playing one of my guitars daily, moving forward toward the holidays, is a win-win-win proposition. And why it is my intention – the music – for some of the moments of yet another Wednesday I have been given. The proof of which is I woke and drank good coffee and was called back by my own poems, and I sit here half on and half off a straight-back basement chair composing three more morning pages. And I have summer in my imagination, via the poetry, and summer in my heart even here in the Portland December of rain and cold, and hope is in my heart as well, that I can play with new words amidst all the floating musical notes and just maybe engage some reader in travel from there to right here.

Magical words.