A Changing Heart
Longing for heart-quiet
in the inevitable fall
into Winter’s short days of sun
forwarding to Spring’s
longer days — a circling back
in the sameness of time.
Heart-and-mind-numbing time
with no respite. A longing to quiet
those thoughts playing back
battle after battle. The awful
repetition. Mind and life wasting.
And, in the darkest season,
the conviction that the sun
will only half-rise in this lifetime
of mine. Feeling that sting
as from a bee’s disquiet
of green slumber. Swelling to a fault,
every damned day. Slamming me back,
season upon season. Holding me back.
Chilling me with doubt that sun-
shine can overcome rainfall
and that, invariably, given time,
better times will come and quietly
advance into Spring. Fast forward, past Spring
to Summer, and onto Fall springing
back to Winter, and round again. Flashbacks
ever more glaring under the sun, then, quite
out of the blue — a glance, a nod. Overrun
with fluttering, my heart paces in time
with fledging love’s free-fall.
And, with the passing of another Fall,
Winter heralds in the sweetest of Springs:
daffodils and Easter bonnets — a lifetime
of celebration ahead, no looking back.
Past risk and reason, I bask in the sun
that is love’s shine. Rain or shine, quiet
in the peace of it all, Fall after Fall, back
to Winter, Spring, Summer. Quiet as a Spring sun
bursting through clouds. Love, for all time, requited.
*
A Box, Full
of photos — a glaring paper trail of a failed marriage —
the snapshots (first) locked away (intact) during
the legal separation — the wife having learned that
her husband, a shrink, had a love life outside their bed-
room, in an adjacent room (sound-proofed, but alas,
not fool-proofed!). A room he had the gall to call office,
on a couch on which she heard tell he had many women
going nuts for him, including, it’s since come to light,
a patient or two. One such paramour, who became wife
#2, surely would’ve needed more patience married to him,
had she not divorced him, too, one would think. During
that legal separation, perhaps she, too,
had reconfigured her family photos, as wife #1 did:
With a cuticle scissor, taking great pains not to nip
the children, she’d cut out the soon-to-be ex’s heads
and flushed them down the toilet, leaving the children
smiling up at hole-after-hole-for-a-face.
After the divorce, she’d cut his bodies out, tossing them
in a trash bin (along with an envelope full of negatives) —
the children left leaning on a slew of missing
father figures.
And, like wife #1, it’s likely that wife #2 also suspects
there’s a poop-load of similarly doctored photos buried
deep in a score of women’s drawers — evidence
the psycho-shrink has been, one way or another,
fully eliminated.
*
Biography
RUTH SABATH ROSENTHAL is a New York poet, well published in the U.S. and, also, internationally. In October 2006, her poem “on yet another birthday” was nominated for a Pushcart prize by Ibbetson Street Press. Ruth has authored five books of poetry: “Facing Home” – “Facing Home and beyond” – “little, but by no means small” – “Food: Nature vs Nurture” and “Gone, but Not Easily Forgotten.”
For more about Ruth visit her websites: http://newyorkcitypoet.com and http://bigapplepoet.com and her blog site: http://poetrybyruthsabathrosenthal.com
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Tales From The Forest 