Finding a Way

There are questions, conflicts, catastrophes and heartaches that I simply cannot think my way through. It really doesn’t matter how long or how assiduously I apply myself. Sometimes I have no recourse but to feel my way through to the answer or the other side.

“The only way out is through,” sings Alanis. But it’s not all that straightforward a process, this feeling one’s way towards understanding and acceptance. The heart must somehow find its light...its North Star, and all one can do is give it the time and space it needs. And some things…well…some things you just have to live with…

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Make Me Hear You
By Reginald Gibbons

When my Aunt Lera – tiny now,
slow moving and slow talking –
wanted to tell me about
her life, she began by saying,
“Curtis and me had just one…
year…together.” Curdiss
(the way she says it) was
a genial great man by all
remembrances of him, and the two
of them, just married, would go
fishing in the evening from
the banks of the Pearl,
the green stream in Mt. Olive,
Mississippi. A year of that –
quiet aloneness together
after supper, things each showed
the other, the bed turned down –
and then Curtis’ father
came to live with them
in their tiny house and while
Curtis was away at work
in the mill the old man would
find his way out to the yard
and have fits, twirling around,
falling, so she’d have to
pick him up and carry him
back inside, and that was
how they lived till
Curtis died, and then his father.
The pain that Lera wouldn’t
cry of now is like what I’m
now the cause of: the things
gone in time that you and I
held only as sweet memories
of towns, walks, rivers,
beds, kingdoms, I took away
a second time when I killed
your hopes – and mine,
and mine – for more sweet days
to come, and I left that
best time locked in the past.
Dead Curdiss is Lera’s
old ghost who’s flown with her
into every day, the lost chance
to live alone with him as he was
and could have been, and you’re
the ghost who’ll fly alongside
me into the ruins and rooms
I decided we would never
share again – hovering up just
when you see the thing you want
to show me, and unable to hear
me say back to you, Oh, Love, I would
never have seen that without you.

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