Image by Chalo Garcia
Ah, you have heart secrets,
little accumulated black spots
like stones piled up on a river bank.
Perhaps they began in moss, as a child,
followed you up the interstate and
built as you walked down all the paths
best left virgin.
Thinking the blemishes really brought by
tainted others you ran from the ones
who love you and took unseen meetings
with that which doesn’t.
Those shrouded negatives never develop
into positive family pictures left for others
to admire.
Darkness is self-created like fresh yeast,
sifted dough rising and rising or uncloroxed
mold on a shower curtain.
To say the trees are naked now
is a mystery never plumbed while summer
lay on the mountains pregnant and hot.
Yes, the trees are bare and stark, but
everything still pulsing within them
lies dusky and waiting.
That’s why you love October the most,
each transforming leaf a brilliant spot
of color muting, for a time, heart secrets
drawn together by gravity’s rainbow, in
the mind as large as the swallowing black hole
at galaxy’s center.
These are consolation’s tongues where love
becomes nostalgia and the hallucination
cast upon you like a spell knows no anodyne
save to rake the leaves fallen from the trees.
Ralph Monday is Professor of English at RSCC in Harriman, TN. Hundreds of poems published. Books: All American Girl and Other Poems, 2014. Empty Houses and American Renditions, 2015. Narcissus the Sorcerer, 2015. Bergman’s Island & Other Poems, 2021, and a humanities text, 2018. Twitter @RalphMonday Poets&Writers https://www.pw.org/directory/writers/ralph_monday
JMWW 