Poetry Dispatch No. 30 | November21, 2005
I sent my song to find you by Jackie Langetieg
Mother, life has become the dream, the one where I can’t catch anyone or find anything. It goes speeding by while I stretch my empty hands after it. Train windows, back lit, reflect lost loves, dead parents, and those giggling boys racing up and down the aisle past laughing friends who go nameless in my present confusion. In the background, an orchestra plays the Liebestod from “Tristan and Isolde” at each station platform as I limp by, feet worn down to ankles digging small graves in the sand I must pull away from, each time more slowly.
Lately, I have trouble escaping the sound of wind day or night, inside or out, like a storm at sea, roiling, eddying into the spongy labyrinth of my brain—or signals from a short wave radio, thoughts I can’t decode, they, too, just wind; if I catch a word or two, it’s run, or escape, or away. I’m an expatriate, hunched down in the swamp’s tall grass straining to hear footsteps through the breathing of night and cicadas, wanting, yet not wanting to be left in my quiet place of no explanations.
Yet, daughter, you unlock your computer with my name every morning at your work, and in the evening, at home, you call me again. Do you know that you were doing this long before we began this dialogue. Without thinking, you think of me.
from WHITE SHOULDERS, Cross+Roads Press
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