Gray Day Musings & Neruda

I am sitting at my desk taking a break from working. My heavy, thick glass window to the world is open. Life filters in. Jays screech about their dampened feathers, a male cardinal calls his absent mate, the wind blusters about, enters my room, restlessly rustles my papers, chills me. The sky is steel. An overt warning of hair raising, electric flashes and deep, shuddering anger that booms and bellows while raging torrents pummel. I am swept up in the emotions of this gray afternoon. Poetry fills deep voids, gaping hollows with substance, meat, food. Then, I receive bad news. Perfect day for those pained, hurting. Falling tears may be disguised as precipitation. Poetry is needed, read, to shake the shadows of the Grim Reaper, so close, so near my friend’s family. Attempts at poetic therapy, self-medication. The following distracts me, a selection from one of my favorite poets filled with such passion his words often drip with seduction.

It’s good to feel you are close to me

It’s good to feel you are close to me in the night, love,
invisible in your sleep, intently nocturnal,
while I untangle my worries
as if they weretwisted nets. Withdrawn, your heart sails through dream,
but your body, relinquished so, breathes
seeking me without seeing me perfecting my dream
like a plant that seeds itself in the dark.Rising, you will be that other, alive in the dawn,
but from the frontiers lost in the night,
from the presence and the absence where we meet ourselves,something remains, drawing us into the light of life
as if the sign of the shadows had sealed
its secret creatures with flame.~Pablo Neruda