Constraints

Hi my friends!

I should have announced already that the Rolling Desk will come to you fortnightly for the next few months. Call it summer schedule. Call it self-imposed limits. Know it’s because I only want to bring you my best as I gather glimpses from the road, inner and outer, and try on new forms in which to share them with you.

Today, two poems.

I miss you

feels trite.

Do you remember

staying up longer than moon

for the cocoon of “me too,”

the we in the wound?

Just yesterday

yes was a given—

that summit, that plunge

that distance. Once,

you cycled 98 miles,

grass and sea flying

like disheveled locks. What now

of whim, dear old me?

At about the time we descended to the

belly of the stadium for brats and garlic fries, it

came to me that I would not fare well the next

day. Let’s be real. I knew this event would take me out

even before I slept, early, while everyone else, to make up

for time apart, for words misheard, played card games and

gathered memories made of loud laughter,

heaping them like triple scoops of

ice cream into cups they’d barely known were empty.

“Jedna si jedina!” the B.H. fans cheered. And I didn’t

know if I’d have kicked myself more for not going.

Looking down onto the green field, left toward three

mirrors for faces, I knew. I want. It’s part of me. Everything. Only

now, I pay for what was normal in days behind a wall. Invisible,

opaque, it swallows my words, my brightness, my vision.

Perhaps, this response is message, deposited in layers of

quietude, nacre secreted to protect the soft mantle of me.

Rarely do I sit in merit inherent. Perhaps tears

shed—as inexhaustible ache, as my mother

tells the story, draped in shawl, of her grandmother

unwilling, choiceless, leaving her children in an orphanage—are

valve, recalling the grain of doubt lodged years or ages back.

We are, all of us, stunning, spiral. We are, none of us,

xeroxes. Perhaps returning to me has nothing to do with saying

yes to all or watching for goals under sun mid chants of,

“Zmajevi!” Perhaps a new dragon, iridescent, is still forming.