MEDITATIVE WEEK OF POETRY: CHRIS HAVEN
Everybody keeps asking what brings comfort
these days and I want to say all the same things
but that's not true. Nothing brings comfort
like the poems we looked in to the past, the days
of bombing and sunrises and jet-fueled beliefs
wafting in a sky so blue you could almost touch
that child you used to be, the one with different
beliefs but not so different that your feet don't settle
into them when you take them out for a spin.
Everything's different now and the beer doesn't taste
so good, not when we're all so out of breath so out
of sorts, so out of supply, out of outside, just out.
Sometimes I see the things piling up that are not
being done well, and I have to look away.
Is surrender a kind of comfort? These sweatpants,
soft like a baby, and this one heavy quilt
still does the trick. Not like my mother, long dead
or the solid absence of my father, longer
dead, but safe just the same because nobody can find
me under there, is what I tell myself, as I time-travel
to eras I was not alive and ages when I'm not sure how
alive I was. I do this on the phone too, with my brother
who is different from me and knows exactly what
I'm trying not to say. Sometimes we have this silence
where we both go still - listen, cradle each other.
