A Portal for Our Dreams

 

Beneath the epidermis, top-left quadrant,
I feel the pinch: where memory resides,
three-quarters (or five-sixths?) of a lifetime long.
How many years are left, to gaze on loveliness,
consort with dogs, pen my rhymes?
We always want more, when this moment
- now - so richly layered, is perfect
and Enough.

We let so much slip by, may only realize
how glorious it all is when mobility is gone,
and we're viewing life through a single window pane,
when our bed has become a portal
for our dreams. In our darkest midnights, still,
sometimes we fly.

My bones are bending to the earth
like a witching wand, a tuning fork,
attuning themselves to Mother Earth's low hum.
In those profligate years, we thought time endless,
spent it gloriously, foolishly,
those days when we felt forever young.

Now memory sings, now pinches,
Time woven through with snippets of wonder:
sea-fog wisping across small islands,
smell of sea salt and clumps of kelp,
a raven's throaty croak, an eagle's dive.

Such gratitude
that I am still
alive.